Core Improvements
This week our focus was on implementing improvements based on the results of the last play test. As the objective is to have a polished vertical slice of the game, we are working on several aspects at the same time without dwelling too much on any of them. This means that there are a lot of small fixes and improvements, nothing too big or eye-catching. Still, working on polish is always a painstaking job that demands a lot of focus from you and progresses annoyingly slower than you would expect or want.
There were two levels that received changes to their level design, levels 3 and 5. In level 3 I had to change to accomplish the following goals:
Clarifying that players can go to lower and higher floors
Guiding the players towards the south area at the start of the level
Lowering the difficulty in the north area.
Bullet-Points 1 and 2 were accomplished by moving the first enemy in the south area and changing their patrol route. Now they go up and down between the south and central areas in a short enough patrol route to be visible for the players regardless of where they choose to move first, while being long enough to be easily crossed. This teaches that it is possible to move up and down while calling attention to that specific road.
To lower the difficulty I added a couple of extra walkable tiles that give the player space to move around the enemy in the straight line road on the north. These tiles also connected the straight line road with the circular roads of that section, which gives the player a shortcut in case they got here from the south route or if they enter here forgetting they already pressed the button on this side.
For level 5 I had two objectives to accomplish:
Separate the start point from the end point
Make the overall level less hard specially the south section
For the first bullet-point I created an extra area one level lower than the central area. Here it is implied the player came from the maze without calling too much attention to it. Also, it still is close to the end point while being separated clearly enough to not be confused with it. This maintains the original design vision while implementing the fix.
To lower the difficulty in the east area I removed one of the enemies and moved and changed the rotation pattern of the other. Meanwhile in the south area I added more space between enemies and made the rotation pattern of one of the enemies on each area easier. In the south area I also removed the walking enemy at the very end as it made that part of the level feel bloated.
Across all of the levels I added a few more checkpoints as during the test we observed how new players might need some extra ones placed to avoid repeating unnecessary sections. Initially we didn’t consider these necessary as we didn’t lose that often but that's not true for new players still not used to the controls.
Lastly, I created new materials and organized the ones we already had. The reason behind this was twofold, to improve our development process by making things easier to find and to ensure we have enough materials for everything. Talking a bit more about the second point, we noticed that some objects were being occluded when we felt it wasn’t necessary so I created variations of already existing materials that don’t occlude and some new materials for objects that should never occlude. This allows us to control more how the maps look, creating more aesthetically pleasing maps that also are better functionally speaking.
From my partner's side, she implemented several quality of life improvements from the programming side. First she added some visual effects to the enemies so it is easier to understand what tiles they are affecting and when. This was one of the issues we had that wasn’t obvious to us because we grew used to the game as it was, but now that this fix is implemented it does make the game feel more pleasant to play.
Second, she made selecting the colors from our color pallet easier inside the engine. This may sound like a very small detail but it speeds-up the development process a lot and makes it less tedious.
Finally she implemented a new lighting configuration to the game. This improved the mood we want to create so much it is possible this is going to be the configuration we use for the final product.
We still have some fixes to implement and may iterate on some that we already made, but we are aiming to have the next demo ready by the end of the week or the middle of next week.
