[Week 7] Game Alpha

This week we showcased our Game's Alpha which highlighted the cell stage and tutorial, as well as certain mechanics in the cell stage such as festering cells, resetting rotations, and the introduction of the rotational power gauge.

After receiving feedback from various play testers including industry professionals, we have decided to rework various mechanics of our game. The list is as follows:

• We have reworked how festering cells work. Previously festering cells work by growing adjacently every time a rotation of any sort has been made. This cause some user frustration and error more often than not. The new functionality is that festering cells are attached to very specific rotatable objects, and they will only fester when the player rotates that object a certain number of degrees.

• In place of a rotational power gauge and reset button, we are swapping over to a location based reset area where in order to reset the previously done rotations, you have to navigate to a specific location that has this reset area. We plan to incorporate this reset area into puzzles by using the updated festering cell mechanics to force the player to solve their way to this area in order to get finish the stage. An example of this is where you have to rotate a wall out of the way, but a festering cell is attached to that wall and is now blocking your way to the end of the stage. In order to free up the path to the end of the stage, you have find the reset area which may be hidden behind another puzzle.

• The rotation controls were unintuitive to some users on keyboard, so we have built out two working models of an updated system for this. The first is a remapping of the controls to the walking buttons wasd, so whenever you are in rotation mode, you are used to the keys needed already. The second is by using the mouse cursor, such that when you click and hold, you will be able to rotate objects freely. We are looking for play tester feedback on which option is most intuitive between the two to finalize this mechanic.
  

• Finally, the first stage of the game was deemed too advanced by experienced professionals, so we decided to take their criticism in mind and rework the initial stage from the ground up to make it more linear and slow for the player to better understand "what is happening", "why is this happening" and giving them breathing room between the introduction of mechanics to fully come to terms with those concepts.

Upcoming Goals and Sprints:

• Sound Effects for ground objects (Mar 3)
• Add a better indicator of how much left you can rotate (Mar 5)
• Finalize the rotation script (Mar 5)
• Add a effect when fungus fester (Mar 10)
• Add a more polished highlight for rotating objects (Mar 26)
• Finalize music for level 2 (Mar 26)
• Finalize environment (Mar 26)
• Main Menu (Mar 26)

Try out our Alpha in the attachments