Overview

This week the team worked on using the feedback from the playtest conducted on Saturday to improve our experience. We made some improvements on the existing systems as well as introducing some new mechanics to enhance the player experience.

Progress over the Week:

Last saturday we had a big playtest in Pittsburgh durin ETC playtest day. We had different groups of families visit the project room of Legato. In total we had 47 playtesters, ages ranging from 7 to 57. Here is a summary of their feedback:

Positive:

– Target audience (Non-gamer/casual gamer parents and kids ages 8-12) enjoy the game

– Group events are easy to understand and creates excitement in the team

– The healing mechanic and enemies targeting cannons seems to increase the communication between the captain and the shooters

Needs Work:

– The level seems too easy for skilled players

– The color coded enemies mechanic is not currently conveyed to players

– Rotation wheel for shooters can get difficult to control when there is the need to respond quickly to many enemies

– More instructions are needed to explain the healing mechanic to players

After the playtest the team had a implementation-heavy week. We implemented a character selection environment in the beginning to allow players to choose which character they would like to play as. Most of the week was spent on visual improvements to help explain things better to players.

We tweaked and worked on the color coded enemies. We turned them into burgers, which seemed more fitting into the theme and easier to communicate. Additionally, we added more visual feedback to them to convey better to players that they can only be shot with same color bullets.

We also made some improvements on the healing mechanic. We improved the user interface and the visual feedback to make everything more clear.

Finally we implemented 3 different special bullets for each gunman with the intent of giving gunmans one more interaction and more characteristics to their pirate. Right now green cannons shoots a sticky bomb with a slow down effect. Yellow pirate has the ability to shoot a jelly stream that destroys everything in the line and the purple pirate shoots a jelly cluster that shatters into multiple bullets when collided with and enemy.

Designers also started designing the checkpoint system and a treasure collection stage at the end.

Next Steps:

The team will be aiming to complete a game loop for the end of the next week. An experience where player can fight the enemies, fight the boss and collect gold. The week after that will be spent on tweaking enemy waves, start-win-lose screens and visual improvements.