Designer Devlog 2

Hello again! In this sprint, not much new design work was done of, instead just iterating on what we had. For the work that was done, most of it was spent figuring out what needed to be in the first playtest and getting people to test those features. Overall, I’m proud of what we were able to get into the first playtest, and I’m also very happy to have gotten so much valuable feedback on our first build of the game.

First, I spent time making changes and consulting with the team. Honestly, this took up most of my time. While the producer was doing most of the actual managing for the project, I was still responsible for making sure the work being produced matched the vision for the project. This was most apparent with the first prototype level, where I worked with our level designer to create the first level. I helped him plan out where every platform and section went, making sure that the level properly taught the mechanics to the player. Alongside this, I also made slight changes to the GDD while checking in with the programmers to ensure the work they were doing was solid.

The big takeaway from this sprint, however, was the playtesting. I worked with random people in the library, as well as with several people I know online. In total, I was able to get 10 playtesters. In future sprints, I would like to get more playtesters, though I was still able to gather a lot of valuable information from the ones I had.

The main thing to note from the playtests is that the movement was kinda wack. For starters, players kept getting stuck on ledges. This was mainly due to using a rigidbody as the player controller and having the movement tied to Update(). This caused a lot of collision issues and meant we needed to re-evaluate our movement code. An easy fix would be switching to a player controller component instead of using a rigidbody, as the player controller component will help deal with these issues. It would also allow the player to walk up slopes, something that wasn’t possible with a rigidbody without creating our own fix in Unity. The second big thing we learned is that we need to tweak a lot of values on the player movement. A few examples include increasing gravity for the player, increasing the base jump height, increasing the amount of midair control from pogoing, decreasing gun knockback, and more. These are all things we’ll continue to adjust until we find something that feels right.

Another major thing we need to address is the balance between the gun leg and the pogo leg. What I noticed is that a lot of players preferred using the gun leg over the pogo leg, mainly because they could shoot while standing on the ground. This wasn’t the original vision for the gun, as the player should only be able to shoot while in the air. This was an oversight on my part, but it also highlighted another issue with the interplay between the pogo and gun legs. If the player can only shoot and pogo while in the air, then why would the player ever pogo if they can just immediately pogo once they leave the ground? If we nerf the gun’s knockback to push players toward pogoing, then what’s the point of shooting besides killing enemies? And if killing enemies is not the main goal of the game, then the incentives for using these movement abilities start to fall apart. One possible fix could be making the gun only able to fire after pogoing, though this will need some testing first. It’s going to take some fine-tuning to ensure that these systems work together and each carve out their own niche in the movement sandbox. Otherwise, the game could quickly become very one-note.

Along with all of these issues is the general need for more feedback. This was mostly ignored in order to get a working build out but is something we need to address for our next playtest. Feedback will come in the form of implementing our animations and SFX.

My next work will be creating annotated maps and early blockouts for the overworld. I’ve actually already done this, but I’ll show that off in the next sprint blog.

One final thing I worked on in the background was making music for the game. It’s not done yet and will need some refining, but it can be listened to here: https://tinyurl.com/2be2l2fm