After finishing up a vertical slice of our experience last week; the first island; and having playtested it at softs, it was time for our final stretch. We focused on two major things this week – to add more content to the world (client request) and to iterate on our tutorial (playtest feedback).
In terms of adding more content we already had a basic structure for two more islands ready to go – the fall island and the winter island. We also decided on the rides that would be the most interesting to put in these worlds based on the time we have left. Since our players liked rides that both they and the slime can interact with, we took those as our pillars for deciding the rides at this point. We chose to add a seesaw and a swing on the fall island and a merry go round with .a snowman on the winter island.
After a week of intense creating, playtesting and iterating we managed to make all three of them work based on physics and player interaction. A particularly hard one to figure out was the seesaw, because it would not react accurately to player’s needs. At the end we were satisfied with the state of all the three rides.
While our programmers were working on the physics based rides, our artists focused on polishing out the look of the islands as much as possible. VFX elements like fall leaves and snowflakes were used to draw the player attention in the VR world whenever a new island spawned.
Next, the second big thing over the week was making sure our tutorial worked without our help or prompting to the player in game. So we playtested it extensively and decided to add voice overs to the already existing visual gestures to make sure our instructions got through to the player.
Overall, this turned out to be a week where we added more content than almost all the other weeks combined. At this point, we had tamed our tech and we just wish we had more time to implement our vision into a better game.
Oh, and before you leave, here is a surprise feature. Since we could change the color of the slime, we decided that the children two slimes make would have the color of either parents or a blend between them.