#erasmusteam

I’m glad we could to show our game at this playtesting event. There were very different kind of players that had interest in adventure games and we had the opportunity to observe their play very closely.

I took turns with Birgit and Petra in writing the observations. Before and after play we asked the player some questions, first the demographic data and after about pet interaction evaluation. Some people commented our game even during the play and were telling us their recommendations even about things we weren’t asking. Some people on the other hand responded very briefly. There very only very few ones who did not finish the game, because of their time constraints.

My last part of finishing the Game was to continue creating videos. I ended up with 4 videos (including already mentioned videos in the last post): The intro with the story, that happened to be a bit too long, a video in which the mole is digging and then leaving into the direction of the village, the video how the fence opens after the clock riddle was solved correctly and the outro with an earthshake and the tunnel and story.

MOJO: we arrived at Taguspark at 9 and began to prepare our “booth”. We provided two laptops, we had the control sheet(s), the poster, and small flyers that were handed over to the player with their own achievements (thanks to my colleagues). 

Luckily we had a good estimation of the duration of one session, so doing one playtest took about 30 minutes. We had about 15 people who tested our game, some of them didn’t finish the game, but in terms of feedback and player sessions the number is not bad in my opinion. We still have to analyze the results and write the final report. 

Well it’s been quite busy week, my part lay mostly within making dialogues, which was not the most pleasurable thing since our dialogue engine is not really advanced and clever as wee would need it. Therefore there had to be a lot of dialogue files, some of them differ only a little bit. Each one has to be called in a specific situation in the script, depending on the circumstances and choice of the player.

I was also adjusting other details, e.g. putting captions and highlight over interactable objects, making a tombstone more obvious for the player, since it is a longterm goal.

We are almost at the end of our work, unfortunately new todos show up all the time, some are smaller, some are bigger. The smaller ones I worked on last week: *finishing the assets on the island *make a better model for the crank of the final riddle instead of just a cylinder *make paths on the textures of the island *improve the texture for the middle of the riddle *... Bigger things I worked on: *adding canvases for videos - intro, outro, mole, fence and start playing the videos at the right time *create the corresponding videos (intro, outro, mole, fence). Right now there is only the mole video and the fence video done (it was really hard to find a good software for video editing...). Althought I am intending to make the fence video again since the assets changed, so it looks also nicer in the video.

This is how the final island will probably look like:

And one frame of the mole digging video:

I was also working on the playtesting plan last week. I wrote the new scenarios in the two documents, the concept and the playtesting plan. We decided to focus on the abilities, so it is also necessary to implement them, thats something else I spent the last week with. There are still a few (small) things missing regarding the abilities, but basically it is possible to use them and they fulfill their purposes. 

I was also working on the weather. Our circle should change the weather accordingly, that is a part of the riddle and a nice feature, that’s why we don’t want to miss it. I had to deal with particle systems and skyboxes in unity to build clouds and rain and night. That requiered also to create assets with photoshop. These are two images that show the result of the weather work:

Unfortunately the ingem weather doesnt look as good as from farther away like in the image.

I was also working on the controls. First I started with the UI, placing the health indicators and the buttons of the abilities, adding code where the functionality of the abilities can be easy added. And adding the inventory including the button of the UI, so that it opens, when the button is pressed. At first it was a little bit hard to align everything and to have the correct structure so that it also scales correctly with the window resolution, but after a while everything worked out.

We were thinking about several controls posibilities and looks of UI, so we sketched them and Birgit conducted a session with 5 people from our focus group. I suppose she will write details about that in her post, so I will not waste the space with that. But as result, we decided to make clickable UI on screen for pet commands. Consequences from that regarding controls of our main character were, that rotating of camera is available only with right mouse button pressed (similarly to MMORPG games). I was working on implementing that with Ethan, because all the animations for our own main characters are not yet done, but it would be easy to just replace the model and animator animations (with preserved states and behaviour). For the wolf part, all the animations for all the actions are done already, so we created our own animator and script for controlling the pet behaviour. All the functionality is not yet implemented, but we will work on that during weekend.