This week's focus revolved around multiplayer changes, testing some new ideas, and creating some new features for our Authoring Tool.
Our multiplayer experience feels okay right now but we wanted to try another method for the game, mainly what would it be like if player's had to compete for only 1 item at a time. Our fears were true about this mode. Once one player started winning and was really good, the other players would not get any points. So we scratched that idea. Now we're polishing the current multiplayer. We finally added a temporary result screen for it which is great. What's missing now is some additional levels of feedback and placing the feeling of competition throughout the level.
This week we also experimented with a new location-based controller. Player's must swipe in the direction of the "object panel" and not the location of the object on the screen. This was a simple idea that we thought to try for dealing with our accuracy and object overlapping problem. It also should add a small amount of difficulty. We're going to test this next week.
Currently, we don't have any menu screens or ways to navigate the game experience using the phone. These things are crucial to the final game so we're going to begin working on that next week. We already have some mock-ups so all that's left is implementing those and testing which navigation ideas work the best. We also plan to add level rankings to each of the levels we currently have and showing those on the level select screen. The functionality has been added to the tool as of now.
Here's a random idea we're going to try! What if we had a level that was 10min long?...is there a way to make that engaging to players for the entire experience. We don't know so we're going to make one! Look out for updates on how that went next week.
-Faceless Prod.