This week was huge and extremely busy because both Thursday and Friday we conducted playtests. Thursday’s playtest was part of our class so most of the testers were faculty or students from other classes in the department. Friday, though, we had the chance to be a part of the Brick City Homecoming Playtest that the department was conducting. This playtest was our first chance to show off some actual functionality to the public so it was both very exciting and very nerve-wracking. Both playtests went extremely well though. We received tons of amazing feedback regarding things like onboarding, timing of actions, and feel of actions, among others. It was truly a great experience, and we can’t wait to iterate on the things brought up in these comments and show off our game again.
However, because of these playtests, this week was a little light in terms of development. Most of the work we did was pretty much focused exclusively on the playtest. Of course, almost all of it is work that would have had to be done anyway, even without the playtest, or it will be recycled into new functionality, but the context that we had to create to actually test these things took a lot of time to create. We also ended up taking part in some very late night development sessions, just to make sure that everything was working. Though, one of these late nights was due to the small separation between the playtests. Because they were so close together, we had the opportunity to identify some small changes that we thought would be impactful after the first playtest and change them for the second in response to feedback we’d already received. So in that way, it was an extremely interesting process. Even so, after the playtests, we all took a much needed break, and not a lot of development happened over the weekend.
That’s not to say the art team didn’t do anything though. As usual, our art team continued blowing us away with their progress, delivering updated concept art, testing on colors, and tons of UI updates that you can read about in more detail below.
Beyond all of that, this Tuesday, the 19th, is also the end of our current sprint. So we’ll be reviewing our progress and process to see what changes we need to make to continue development in a healthy way, and we’re already anticipating changes due to those aforementioned late nights.
But anyway, on to the details:
Art
- Sofia iterated again on the sword concepts, working to unify the hilts of the different swords a little more yet.
- Sofia also created some initial VFX concepts.
- These may also be used as the beginnings of animation story-boards for attacking.
- Xy started testing out colors for the arch that signifies the entrance to the shrine where the sword is kept.
- Effie created a number of UI design work:
- An initial main menu design that includes the game title, the team name, a shattering effect background, buttons, and their screen layout.
- A design system sheet that includes gamepad button icons, keyboard key icons, defined fonts and headline sizes, and primary/action colors.
- A general and a themed intro cutscene design.
- An updated pause screen design.
Development
- John finished up the swinging enemy challenge for the playtest.
- Kyle setup the playtest area itself.
- This started with grayboxing, but eventually was replaced with challenges developed by other team members.
- Kyle also added in our in-game onboarding.
- This took the form of signs throughout the playtest level.
- Nick finished programing the interactions for the boss swing challenge.
- Nick also programmed our respawn point mechanic.
- Trent fixed some of the bugs we were having with the target lock behavior.
- Trent also implemented the chip damage system for blocking that we designed.
- Along with the swinging enemy challenge, John also programmed the cannon challenge for the playtest.
- Rudy implemented the UI for the playtest.
- Trent made some more architectural changes regarding his object management system.
- Nick & John implemented the current iteration of our player model.
Management
- Kyle created a Qualtrics survey to help us gather information after the playtests.
Documentation
- Trent wrote the Sprint Summary for last sprint in our Design Doc.
- Trent also updated the Task Management section according to some new process things we’ve been trying out.
So that’s it for this week. It was a big week, and we took a break towards the end, but we’re still moving forward. Once again, we appreciate everyone joining us in our development journey, and we hope to see you again next week.