As we reached the end of the first sprint, week 7 offered us many useful information.  The biggest event is our small demo hours to ETC classmates. It was not a formal playtest, but we believe it was very informative since many of our fellows offered feedback and suggestions. And we all know, iteration is the key.

Production

The production process was slightly affected by the half schedule, since we would give the presentation on Monday and we need to give some time to the preparation. The first half of the week got intense, however we finished most of the missions by end of the week. As a plus, we planned well for the half presentation so there was no need of working in the weekend.

During the demo hours, we showed our latest version of story beats and the current build to guests and asked for feedback on story, art style and control scheme. With the feedback we could conclude that the system for the game worked pretty well. For the character art, we might need

– Magian

Tech

This week, we’ve been merging the Design and Art prototypes with our Tech prototype. Swapping the ugly prototype map we had with the actual rooms we’re going to use in the game didn’t take that long, as it’s only a matter of swapping one tilemap with another.

A change that took more time was how the door mechanic (moving the player from one room to another) works. Previously, once the player is next to the door spot, a button will pop up and the player would have to manually confirm it. It didn’t fit the art well, as we currently use open doors to indicate that a room is accessible, so we changed the interaction so that once the player moves through the doorway, they will be transported to the other room.

The placeholder icon for the player has been replaced with an animated sprite, and now the new player avatar can literally walk around the map, instead of simply sliding around.

A big difference between the old placeholder map and the new map was that the old one was purely 2D, while the new one is 2.5D, which means that the player will sometimes go behind objects or into doors, which are solid objects with collision. We resolved this issue by splitting the tile map into several different layers, moved doors to a layer without collision, and make the back of the walls semi-transparent and without collision.

– Max

Story

Based on the feedback we received from our last test, we simplified the story and replaced certain distracting placeholder names. We also moved some of the events to improve the flow of the story.

We tested the new version with more storyboards on ETC students during our demo day.

In summary of the feedback we received:

>> The ending is understandable

>> The second guiding seems unnecessary

– Tina

Art

This week we created more assets for two category rooms and reworked the main room during feedback during our demo day.

Main room progress:

>> We received feedback during demo day that the perspective is not clear, so we reworked the main room tiles to improve the sense of perspective

>> At the same time we adjusted various alignments of the tiles to better work with the tech team but this has not yet been tested

>> We added shadows for the main room and the first iteration of cables connecting the rooms

Our new main room concept:

Category room progress:

>> We added the very basic tiles for the Forest and Graveyard rooms
>> We added a tree tile for those rooms and started experimenting with drawing trees

– Tina

For the next week, we’re planning to:

>> Give the half presentation and get feedback
>> Start sprint 2 to put in some more art and story
>> Think of scheduling upcoming playtests

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