Week 7: Post Alpha Updates part 1

Hey all! Apologies for a late update this week. This week is reading week for the University of Toronto, so our devs got started on work a bit later than usual. There are still things to update on however, especially since the last post was alpha release.

We received a lot of insightful feedback based on our alpha presentation, including things we did well and things that needed to be worked on. Overall the feedback was quite positive, the game was fun to play and had a good mix of puzzle solving as well as action elements. We're very glad the panel of judges enjoyed our game!

The main feedback we received regarding things we could improve on revolved around clarity. It's still quite difficult for the player to keep track of the bar while they look at their character, so it would be good to add some indicator around the character when they can use an ability. Another point regarding clarity was regarding the walls that can be blown up by mines. Right now the wall is yellow, but the mine corresponds to the down ability which is represented by a blue face/charge bar, so it would be good to have those match. One other clarity point is regarding when enemies get aggro-ed. It's hard to tell at what point an enemy will "take sight" of a player and start walking towards them, so we received feedback that we should add some some sort of visual or sound indicator that the enemy has been aggro-ed.

One thing the judges had high praise for was the music integration, since we had a variety of sounds integrated in the project including background tracks, sound effects, and charge sounds (thank you to our music team). We also received feedback to keep sound balancing in mind, to make sure the most important sounds (e.g. charge sound when you become able to use an ability) are the loudest to the player.

One other piece of feedback we received was regarding the art asset implementation. The models we have in game are quite nice and hit our target aesthetic, but we still have some unimplemented models for some enemy types. This is largely due to the dev team just not having implemented all the assets our artists have provided, so we will get to implementing those soon. Thanks to all the hard work done by our artists again.

Taking all of the above feedback into account (as well as a couple of other pieces not mentioned above) we decided to focus on a couple of tasks for the next couple of weeks. We really wanted to improve on the clarity part, so that's one task we're focusing on, adding an indicator of what abilities can be used around the player. Another task we're focusing on is making hitting enemies satisfying, e.g. adding a screenshake on attack hit. This ideally will make the game more satisfying to play. We're also looking on fixing other clarity issues such as adding a timer for the mine (to know how long it will take to charge), and adding the aggro indicator. Finally, we're looking into add more levels, to just generally add content to the game. Ideally, we'd have 4 regular levels and 1 boss level by beta, but we'll see what we can accomplish by then.

That's all the updates for this week, see you next week (on time)!