Capstone Blog Post 5: Changing perspective and new map

After last week of taking several different QA prototypes to get tested, we looked at our feedback collectively over both versions we tested. We created a checklist of things that were common points in the feedback to make changes for this sprint. We spent our time this sprint working on the feel of the game. Our intended play experience is a fast paced couch competitive game, and in order for us to have a shot of achieving that we had to work more on the controls and the control scheme. We changed several things about the controls and changed the layout of certain inputs. Now the grapple hook is consolidated to one button both the spawning and early termination of it are mapped to the same button now. Tilting up on the left joystick allows you to jump now, a feature we tried getting to work earlier but didn’t implement it successfully which led to the feature fighting with the other movement controls which now doesn’t happen. We also tuned the feel of the characters and their jump, now players jumps are influenced by how long the player holds down the jump button(s). This gives the player more weight to their actions. We also made the special attack activation trigger of pressing both joysticks in easier to activate by only having it be on the right joystick rather then both. Overall the new feel of the game is far better than it was earlier. We are very happy with how the controls feel. I even had one of my friends who is a competitive fighting game player try out the new controls and he really likes the feel which is a good sign. We intend for players to be able to do all of their actions without them ever moving their thumbs off of the joysticks and never having to use the face buttons on the controller aside from if they personally prefer it then the option is there. The controls now feel very responsive and a little bit twitchy but not too twitchy which we think is a good place to be in currently.

Along with the controls we’ve had a complaint that people don’t use the grapple hook and don’t feel the need to because they have no real need since the maps are fairly small. This had us take a second look at the grapple hook in the game. We intend for our future maps to be much larger than the ones we are currently using. While we work on a new map for the game, we took a little bit of time to add a visual for the rope into the game for the grapple hook. From our internal testing with the visual, we ended up using the grapple hook a lot more compared to before. We are curious to see how this new player feedback influences peoples use of the mechanic in future testing.

A new stage has appeared!

In our desire to iterate on stage design and give a clearer representation of where we want environments to head in the future of our game we started prototyping a new stage. This stage features a multicolored lighthouse centered between rocky cliffs. The light from the lighthouse will slowly sweep different players light across the stage blending the colors as it goes. We intended for this stage to be ready by the end of this sprint but a last second animation bug with our player fading inexplicably broke so we were forced to not use this stage this week. We intend on having the stage ready to test by next sprint. We chose to make the new stage a lighthouse because it had a nice blend of stationary colors for players to use as well as dynamic ones such as the light sweeping over the stage, as well as more details we can add in the future such as a sunset in the background influencing the direction of the colors in the foreground. The location is also fairly unique choice as a first stage so we were excited to see where we could go with it. One of the things we wanted to do as well while building this stage is change the games perspective to better fit our games intended camera perspective which is 2.5D. Before we were only using an orthographic camera which doesn’t show depth like a perspective camera does. This became a challenge implementing because we had to get the angle of the camera just right to make it look as we wanted. It also became challenging because we had to adapt screen wrapping to this new perspective which was not an easy feat. Overall building our first real stage was a great learning experience for both of us designers implementing it to cater the design of the stage to make sense for the viewport of the player. It is something we will have to keep in mind when building future stages, especially ones with more verticality.