Design Blog 3 - Sunshine RV

Sprint 4 of Sunshine RV is officially underway and Bootleg Studios has been making great strides to provide our players with the thrill and fun of our game's vision. To make sure we are making the game our players want to play, we hosted a playtesting session in our game's libraries and paid them with candy. Our playtesters were very enthusiastic about playing our game in its early stages and were able to offer us some very interesting feedback. One of the more positive feedback was that almost all of our players had a good idea about the environment they were in based on the models in the game. 

Based on our feedback from this question, all of our players knew that they were in a mobile business environment. There are two learning points from this question. The first one is that I should be a little more specific when it comes to asking the questions on the playtest because one playtester sarcastically replied "The Library" when asked about the [game's] environment that they were in. Secondly, as a designer, I need to find a way to correlate that the vehicle that the player is in is an RV that has been renovated into a food truck. I will do this by adding the rest of the models to the environment that the player will be able to see from the order window section of the game. By the end of sprint 4, we should have a majority of the models in place to provide for a more visually appealing game. As of now, we already have the final version of the RV textured as well as some of the props that will go inside it.

Since we want the player to feel like they are the only one with an RV that has an order window in it but do not want to put in the unnecessary work to create a whole new RV model for the background, we are just going to take the low-poly version of the player's RV and place it in the scene so that the player can only see the side of the RV model that doesn't have the order window on it. Additionally, we will have a variety of textures on all of the RV models so that each one feels different for the player.

In terms of programming, our playtest session uncovered a lot of bugs that our engineering department is working on fixing. Because, while many playtesters were able to understand the environment they were supposed to be in, they were not able to play the game's core loop because of bugs that would prevent them from doing so.  However, the engineers were able to get the first iteration of our game's core features in place so there are going to be bugs to accompany them. So, I am grateful that we were able to find them and start making improvements to them at this stage of development rather than in the later stages. After the bugs have been fixed, all the engineers would have to do is refine the features so that the players can get the aesthetic of being a backyard bartender.