Designer Blog 5 - The Warfront From Intercepts

Hiya Everyone,

Sprint 5 has come and gone and we are in our last full sprint. As always, we got a lot of good stuff done like getting a start on battle simulations, fixing many bugs, and more models for the simulations and props. If you want to know more about what our team has been up to, check out Natalie Hoffmann’s Producer Blog.

This sprint started with a playtest for me. We only had 7 playtesters which was less than I wanted. However, after playtesting with those people, I realized that there was a glaring problem for each of the playtesters. As the last blog post mentioned, there was no tutorial to explain anything. So most were not able to use the mechanics as intended. This can easily be seen in the feedback about the AT Machine and the Chemical Station where an overwhelming majority of the players didn’t know what to do. As mentioned in the last post, this was a known issue and is currently being worked on, but it was also good to learn what were the specific areas that I needed to explain in the tutorial.

While I cut the playtest short, I was still able to get more valuable information. I found that the majority of players found the controls a bit unintuitive and hard to use due to needing to place the messages in a specific location before being able to use them at a location. Most players just want to drag the message directly to the location. We found the difficulty of finding which message was true and which message was fake a bit too easy due to how the fake messages were generated. The fake messages changed everything the player needed to confirm for a fake message, so the player just had to look at the general and see if that was wrong and they could instantly sort out most of the messages. This also made deployment a little boring, but that is also due to players wanting to see miniatures or battles after deploying. The readability of messages was better, but still needed some work since players felt they were still hard to read. We didn’t have a way to focus and bring the message closer to the camera yet, but that has been fixed now. We also need to start adding in our art assets since the rooms are a bit barren. Finally, with any project, we found bugs that our programmers are working on. Despite how short the playtest was, I felt we got a lot of good information done and were able to 

I then started working on programming the tutorial. I knew that there were a few things I needed to consider when making the tutorial: I needed a dialogue system to display text on the screen, I needed to be able to highlight objects within the scene, and I needed to lock the controls to make sure the player does what I want. Why we needed displaying text and highlighting are fairly obvious: the player needs to know what they need to do and highlighting makes sure they know what the tutorial is talking about. These were fairly simple to implement with simple online tutorials and modifying what I needed (though there was a hiccup with me learning what was serializable in the Unity inspector. Hint: not abstract classes or interfaces). Locking controls make sure the player does the tutorial properly and shows the player how the game is supposed to work. I didn’t have enough time for this feature or a whole tutorial to explain everything for the prototype. so I made a temporary system to just explain each station to the player the first time they go to that location. Our producer Natalie, liked this and wants to keep it over a whole tutorial, but I feel like it won't teach the player as well. Ultimately, we decided that we should playtest it and see how well players learn from this system and go from there. The tutorial was a nice task for me since I came from programming and I haven’t been able to do much programming for this project.

Speaking of prototypes, we made a new one. As mentioned earlier, The bigger features we added are the tutorial system and a way to focus on a message you are holding to be able to read it better. As I said earlier, we want to test if the tutorial is good enough for players to start playing the game. Focus is going to help players read the messages, by basically full screening the message to the camera. We also added smaller features for the player like having different rooms for some of the stations so the player doesn’t have a cluttered screen and message table to help organize the messages into stacks. A lot of the changes for this build were bug fixes we found during development or playtesting. Since I’m playtesting when the next sprint starts, I will likely be focusing on how well the tutorial works for the player and what features still need tuning now that the player will hopefully understand how to play the game better.

The last thing I worked on was brainstorming some ideas for promotional material for our game. We needed things like a cover image for Itch, a poster, and a team logo. I worked with artists on what would look good and what would be feasible with the time we had left and I felt we came up with some good designs for them. I ended up making a simple mockup and added them to slides with more information that the artists might need. Overall it was a task that I felt smoother now that I have gotten more comfortable and understanding of working with my artists.

Overall this sprint went well and we are on our last full sprint. Programming-wise, we are programming the last few features we want to include while also polishing and bug testing. Modeling-wise we are basically making the last of the needed models and now working on props to make the game look better. I’m testing the next build for more ways to improve. Overall, I feel we are still in a good spot for the last couple of sprints.

Until Next Time,
Justin Lam
Game Designer