Designer Blog #5

Hello hello everyone! I'm Marisa Moreno, and I'm back to give you guys an update about our game, Robot Riot. As always, the game is produced by our very own Sparkplug Studios, and any discussion of the game's production is covered in our producer Miciah Coley's production blog.

In this blog, I will be covering the playtest data we had received earlier in the sprint, as well as our doubling back on our team's work as we continue to polish and perfect the game.

With the end of production looming very soon, we as a team are revamping our existing levels based on our own observations and feedback we've received from our playtest sessions. We're continuing to populate the levels with more models by our 3D artists, restructuring the levels with our level designers, and continuing to iron out mechanics with our programmers.

A few of the main issues that were noticed during our playtest were notable bugs that have since been fixed. There was a slight hiccup involving screen and menu navigation being a mix of mouse and keyboard input and controller input once players have finally reached the main part of the game. In previous feedback, the camera sensitivity has been a debate among playtesters, and we have since implemented sensitivity adjustment sliders in the main menu to aid with that.

Other bugs and adjustments we have yet to make mostly involve player feedback and how the player is to receive such feedback while playing. We are planning to add a control scheme reminder in the pause menu alongside keybind images while in combat to give players multiple options on how to refresh their knowledge of the control scheme. Another notable suggestion is the addition of a vignette that surrounds the screen when players reach low health, which would give more urgency as to finding health items and running away from the opposing player before their life is taken away.

We as a team decided not to add any other new aspects (mostly large scale additions) at this point in time since the final deadline is fast approaching. The game's design has been within scope since production started, and most of the needs and wants have already been included in the game. It is now at the point of production where we are balancing the existing game mechanics and trying to add more props and elements to make the levels more dynamic and vibrant.

Like mentioned in the previous blog post, our level designers Carl Moreno and Alex Rico have been diligently working on our fourth level, The West, as we continue to polish and buff out the rest of the game. Alex has done an amazing job with producing the environment layout of the level, as well as a custom skybox that Carl has used in his lighting builds. He has given life to the existing models our 3D artists have created and continues to do so as we hope to add more props and areas in game for players to explore. With their work, we were able to playtest The West, which has been our most played level thus far.

Seeing how far the team at Sparkplug Studios has come with the game's production, and as we near the end of the production timeline, I cannot be any more proud of our team and the product their hands have created thus far. We hope to continue this drive as we round out the existing game and get ready to ship our title off.

See you in the next update!