This week was a mad dash to complete our MVP to be ready for our playtesting day. We realized that on Wednesday that we would not be able to complete the entire loop in time because we ran into a few quirks of using the Unity Networking Module.
For our playtesting, we really needed to know if the game was still fun after moving it to digital. We knew that it worked as a physical card game, but it took too many people to manage it properly. Would the frenetic and chaotic energy still be there now that it was on the iPad? That is what we intended to find out, but we still had not completed our MVP, meaning that features were still not implemented. We decided that we would need to scale back what we would deliver, so that we could test the main mechanic of the game. We were unable to implement Panic Mode, a state where items traded to players with full sorting centers must be handled swiftly or the pollution will rise. We thought this would be important to up the pressure of the game, but since we were unable to implement it, we set the pollution to constantly rise. Hopefully, this would instill some pressure, although it would likely be largely different gameplay-wise.
Edicts were not part of the main mechanic of the game, so we also cut those for the playtest version. They are still going to be part of the game, but again, we needed to test that the pace and pressure were still intact. To fill the gap, we had fulfilling wants decrease the pollution level.
Finally, when we had everything ready to go for our playtest build, we ran into a few bugs while integrating. But after a long night of working out all the bugs, we had a playtest build.