Overview

Hello everyone! This week the team made their final decision about with which prototype they want to focus on they tested over the weeks with different mechanics of shooting. After the playtest on Monday and meeting with our client the team decided to move forward with “360 Rotating Cannons” and develop it further.

Progress over the Week:

Last Saturday the team had another playtest to see which shooting mechanic is more intuitive from the 3 prototypes they developed in the past week. We had families come visit ETC from the “Lending Hearts” community and tema Legato ran the test in Pittsburgh. We had about 17 playtesters in the form of groups of 4, families with kids. Here are the results:

Fixed Canon without Aim

– The control is intuitive and easy for both shooter and navigator

– Shooter mostly spamming, lack of design for charge and precision

– Player communicate less. Shooter trust navigator for rotation.

Fixed Canon with Aim

– Generally the same with above

– Player tend to like the independence aiming feature

– But aiming feature still screws up when the ship is rotate at the same time.

360 Canon

– Players tend to communicate a lot to others

– Shooting score competence

– Yielding for blocking

– Defense sector allocation

– Navigator has less challenge and out of the communication circle, mostly just doing their own thing.

As the team realized in the playtest that the communication between gunners were too low once they established which areas to protect, we decided to have color coded enemies. These macaroon enemies are only destroyable with the same colored bullets and the other bullets will be ineffective.

Another thing we worked on this week was improving the communication between the captain and the other players. Because now that we have a shield and vertical movement in the control of the captain, we realized that they were pretty separated from the gunners. So we introduced a new “healing” mechanic for them. We implemented a new enemy type that shoots at cannons and damages them. When the cannons are damaged the captain has to move his shield over there and fix the cannon. We also implemented one more group event, a chocolate syrup that sticks to the ship and requires each player to shake their phone to get rid of the syrup on their controllers.

Next Steps:

As the soft openings get closer, the team started to complete more and more tasks each week with now better established pipelines. With the help of the playtest feedback, we are directing our game into a direction that we are all very pleased as a team. And moving forward, we will be working to get the level outline more in place to make get the feeling of the finished experience more.