PDF Download: Newsletter: Week 12
Delivery day! Lots of work was done in the last week to put this whole thing together and we’re very pleased with our final results. During the week we made some changes based on the playtest we conducted on Friday; those included:
- Dressing up the clue photos with filters to fit the theme. We put the clue and target photos through a grayscale filter so they didn’t clash with the world’s color scheme.
- Tweaking the driving mechanics to made getting stuck harder. The cars were shortened so they didn’t get stuck perpendicular to skinny roads.
- Putting the photo clues in the scene instead of showing them all at the beginning. We put briefcases in the scene that the players have to collect in order to discover the identity of their targets.
- Made the “kill” feedback much stronger/more obvious to the players.
After making these changes, we conducted another playtest on Wednesday this week, first using our original play testers from last week and a set of new testers who haven’t played it before. This time around, we got another very useful set of data:
- Briefcases weren’t obvious.
- Weapons were hard to use.
- UI on the edges of the screen was basically unseen.
- Targets and clues were hard to understand with the filters in place.
The most recurrent theme was one of lack of feedback. Based on these playtests, we spent our time improving the feedback as much as possible, including adding more visual and audio cues to every part of the game.
In addition to gameplay tweaks, we also settled on our final art style on Monday and spent the week prettying up the whole scene. We paid special attention to the lighting of the scene; the feel of a dark and 
rainy night is very important to our theme. We played with color and building style until we found something that sold our comic book feel theme well, and looked pretty awesome to boot! We’re happy with the final product we’ve delivered this week and we’re looking forward to our final cycle starting next Monday. Thanks for reading, and we’ll be back next week with a whole new game!