Capstone Blog Post 4: Project Variations and first QA Feedback

We spent this sprint energized by the feedback from the class building out two variations of our base game with suggestions from everyone present. We agreed that now that we have proven the base concept of our game play we should explore the other aspects of the game we haven’t really touched but have mentioned wanting to explore earlier. Manley mentioned the idea of having three separate builds with fundamental changes in game play to each one to separate them from the base game. So, we did just that. We started thinking of how a chameleon as an animal can blend into any color and with this idea in mind we wanted to change up how the color blending works within our second prototype. In our second prototype variation we decided to let the players switch what color they are (red or blue) via items on the map that can be picked up. While it can be confusing visually we think through we as developers testing it, that it’s already proven to become a fundamentally different game experience with even more potential for mind games between players. We decided however, that when players have one last hit before they die and they bleed out onto the map, that the players color should reset back to black (neutral) and that the player can’t blend in until they die. This creates a different play experience forcing the player who is bleeding out to fight back harder while playing interestingly with color blending overall.

Prototype Variant Two: Players start off as black and must pick up items on the map which changes players colors dynamically

The third variation of the game is more a departure from the first two variations of our game. In this variation, color effectors which you can blend into are gone and it’s all about the blood. In this variation players have a larger map to play in and must capture points on the map shown as white blocks in the background. When players hurt each other their blood only sprays on these white portions of the map. The player to get more of their opponents blood on the sections of the background wins after the timer ends. We think this is a decent start at exploring the possibilities of the territory capture mechanics we have been thinking about as designers for a while. We currently only have three small zones to capture but we think that we can expand that to larger area of the map later on.

Prototype Three: Players must kill their opponent in all of the three blank areas on the map more than the other player in order to win.

When it comes to our team taking feedback we consider ourselves very open to any sort of critique and feedback for our game. We tend to take it as a creative challenge to push our game forward to what we think it can be and hopefully have it live up to it’s perceived potential. This week we went to QA for the first time with our first variation of our prototype where players colors are static throughout the entire match. Overall the game was well received and people quite enjoyed themselves which is always satisfying for a very early prototype. After QA Mico and I took a hard look at the feedback, sat down and made a list of the common points brought up and we immediately incorporated the feedback into that iteration of the game and worked to incorporate it into the next two iterations that we would be testing after class at QA today. Some of those items on that list were some small things, like players wanting a little bit more health so we set the players health to three hits before they get killed. Other things were larger fixes like how the control scheme is little unintuitive currently, the reload time for the grapple hook is far too long, and adding static color effectors on the map. These things and more fixes were incorporated into all our builds and we will continue this practice after every QA session to insure our game grows. Along with these things we have saved interesting comments from testers like when players are in mixed colors they should gain double the rate of what their charge meter increases by. Overall we are very excited to see how testers respond to the next two iterations of ou prototype especially after the last one was so well received.