Wrap Up

Quick update:  Time is running out on The Drop and so we are finishing all of the final tasks that still need to be done.  Up above you can see our awesome redesigned menus done by Elizabeth.  We had most of the ETC faculty stop by and check out our progress on Monday, gathering a lot of crucial final feedback to make some last minute changes where we are able.

Some of the most pressing matters that we are addressing are:

1)  Music contrast still not being strong enough.

People that are unfamiliar with electronic music have a hard time differentiating between the pairs of songs, so we are experimenting with ways to make it even more obvious.  One of the ways we can do that is by using vocals for one of the tracks, so even if the players can’t tell the difference between the instrumentation, they might be able to say: “That one has somebody singing, that one doesn’t.”

2)  Clarity.

Some decisions we have made seem clear to us, but when playtesting are not so obvious to our playtesters.  Examples include having our players dance when they are neutralized.  Playtesters can be confused by this, as players being neutralized is contradictory to them moving around happily.  Rather than fighting what people’s expectations are, we are looking at animations that will closer match their expectations.

The name Beastmode is another example of this.  Although there was a decent reason within our team for naming the item Beastmode, it doesn’t communicate what it does well enough, so we simply changed it to Super Push.  Especially when time is running out, fighting things like this becomes counterproductive.

3)  Triangulation.

Triangulation, as taught to us by Jesse Schell, means at any given moment having the ability to choose between a couple different strategies and avoiding one dominant strategy.  In our playtests we have found dominant strategies emerging where for instance at the beginning of the game, both players just rush for the crossfader.  How can we make it so not going for the crossfader at any given moment is a viable strategy.  Some things we are looking at are making Super Push easier to get, temporary invincibility, damage multiplying item, etc.  It might not fix the issue we are having or as is commonly the case, it might fix something while creating a new problem.  But we want to try a couple of them to see if it could make more interesting gameplay and triangulation.

That’s it for this week.  We will have some promo videos coming up soon next week!

The Drop