Week 5: Road to alpha, week one

Hey all!

This week's update doesn't have any deliverables, but we're still going to give an update regarding progress over the past week. In summary, this week was a lot of reflection on level design and what is fun.

This past week, as a team we scoped out what we wanted to do between now and alpha. For the first week, we wanted to focus on making a longer, more fun level than we had submitted for the first level. We had all our developers try to make their own levels, and we ran into a couple problems.

The first, and probably biggest problem was making a fun level. We have a lot of the components we need to make levels (walls, enemy types, abilities, etc.), but we don't know exactly what is fun. Sure you can drop the player in a room with a bunch of enemies, but how does that become fun? This problem is definitely something that we're trying to work around so we can have something fun for alpha.

Another issue we ran into was regarding performance. One of the developers tried making a level about 2-3x as big as our level submitted for first level, and it ended up lagging a lot. This may partly be due to all the objects on the screen, or many scripts running at the same time, or something else. This might lead us towards making smaller scenes and just loading parts when the player reaches a certain point, or just making levels shorter in general.

One last issue we ran into was regarding scale. It took a couple of hours to put together a shortish level (about the size of the level we submitted for first level), which is not a trivial amount of time. This shortish level could be completed in about 20-30 seconds if the player knows what they're doing, which of course we cannot assume when someone plays our game. After all, the learning process should also be taken into account when assessing how long someone can play our game. This issue can be partially mitigated by allocating more time to tickets regarding making levels, rather than other tickets.

Besides level design, the dev team also took care of the following tasks this week: making a basic main menu, supporting multiple controller types (PS4, XBOX360), improving player visibility, and improving clarity on the UI. We wanted to focus on level design, but also wanted some of these components for a playtest session before alpha.

On the art side, they've worked on a couple more of the enemy models (laser turret), as well as updating the UI to have faces instead of WASD keys. We're getting closer to our UI end goal step by step, and I'm looking forward to seeing Robin's (main character) faces on our UI!

On the music side, we've focused on remixing some background music to use in various levels, and starting work on jingles for each of the abilities. We had integrated sound effects last week, but we're hoping to implement jingles by alpha, since that will help set the scene for our game.

Finally, we're participating in a playtest session with UTGDDC, UofT's Game Design and Development Club tomorrow. We're looking forward to see what others think about our game, and if it's hitting the mark (right now) or not. Our Alpha deliverable is set for next week, so getting some playtesting now will help us iterate over our level and give us the potential to make a better level(or levels) for alpha.

That's all for this week! See you in Alpha!