Development Stories #2: The End

Welcome back! Grab your seat.

This time we’re going straight two the middle...

Playtesting and Polishing

We had an open playtesting session with some of our colleagues, where we were able to test each other’s games and provide feedback. This session was super important since, at this point, were not confident about our mechanics and gameplay.

Highlighting some of the feedback we’ve noticed ourselves and/or received from colleagues:

• Changing the characters' skills to create an asymmetric gameplay
  • Balancing jumps, especially between Cowghost and Bunny ✓ 
  • Removing shooting for certain characters ✓ 
  • Giving a “step/platformer” ability to Jellyfish ✓ 
  • Improving colliders ✓ 
• Cleaning the interface and visuals
  • Getting rid of the scoring system ✓ 
  • Standardize UI (life counter and buttons) ✓ 
  • Adjusting the camera for targeting group ✓ 
  • Improving enemy animation ✓ 
  • Improving bunny attack animation
• Finding a language that fits the new game
  • Change sound effects and music ✓ 
  • Change game messages/feedback ✓ 
  • The title screen is missing ✓ 
  • Solidifying visuals through post-processing ✓ 
•  Finding the Fun/Making it fun + Balancing
  • Add something that puts some pressure on the players to make them communicate more (bee wall) ✓
  • Balance level challenge (remove falling platforms) ✓ 
  • Removing the falling platform to adjust the difficulty level ✓ 
  • Fixing dead ends ✓ 
  • Creating multiple skins for the level

Through the use of the versioning process (thanks to git and fork), we were able to address 90% of those issues for the final playtest round and, while there’s always room to improve, it seemed to us that people appreciated our updates and that the game seemed solid.

So for our next post, we’re coming back with a mini post-mortem, diving deeper into our struggles and insights after coming out of this project.