Testing (Assingnment 5 Devlog)

Testing Devlog

This is the sixth devlog for my game Ultimate Pacman and it is about testing.

Overall the testing session conducted went well and lots of constructive feedback was received from the testers and gained from watching them play the game. The feedback received from various members of the tutorial group consisted of statements saying that the various power-ups were good and that the art style throughout the game looked appropriate. There was also feedback saying that the enemies needed to be more difficult. This was then implemented by adding an option to the path follower script indicating whether the enemy was a seeker or a pursuer and then setting the target node to the one closest to the player’s position if the enemy was a seeker and to the closest node to where the player would be in one second with their current velocity if they were a pursuer. All other enemies were made to maintain their wandering behaviour. An alternative approach considered was to make a new script for each of the behaviours. A gif of the new enemy behaviour can be seen below (Blinky (red) is a seeker and Inky (blue) is a pursuer):

A feature implemented based on another piece of feedback were making the score unable to go negative. This was done in the player collect score script in the coroutine that deals with subtracting a point each second, and making it so no score would be subtracted if that would make the score negative. This can be seen in the gif below:

Another feature implemented based on another piece of feedback was making the player unable to be killed for three seconds after they spawn for the first time each level and after they respawn after being hit by an enemy. This was done by ignoring collisions between the layer the player is on and the layer the enemies are on for three seconds in a coroutine. After this time collisions are enabled again and the player can be hit. This was done in the destroy on collision script for after the player has been hit and in the player movement script for when the player first spawns. A possible improvement to this would be to implement one script that handled this behaviour for each time it should occur rather than having it in two scripts. A gif of this can be seen below:

Another feature implemented based on another piece of feedback was making the power-up duration reset if a power-up is collected while the same power-up is still active. This is so that the power-up is used for its proper duration even if it is already active. This was done in the player movement script using a boolean variable to see if the same power-up had been collected while it was still active. An alternative approach considered was to end the current coroutine and start a new one when a power-up was collected that was currently in use.

Another feature implemented based on another piece of feedback was changing the text font so that it fitted the art style better. The font was changed from the default unity font Arial to an 8 bit font found here for the titles: (Press Start Font, 2019). The font was also change to a different font for the rest of the text found here: (Connection Font, 2019). A gif of the new fonts can be seen below:

Some further planned improvements based on the feedback received are to implement sound and look at the level design so they are more engaging.

References

2019. Connection Font. [online] Available at: https://www.fontspace.com/connection-font-f26375

 [Accessed 9 October 2020].

2019. Press Start Font. [online] Available at: https://www.fontspace.com/press-start-font-f5841

 [Accessed 9 October 2020].