Posted December 07, 2022 by Eryngii01
This week, the focus of the development was on polishing the game based on the feedback from the Feedback Analysis document and further playtesting. After a long period of debate over the new title of the game, we decided to rebrand as "Road Work Ahead".
Final assets were completed to accompany the game's menus, title screen, and tutorial button indicators, as well as final models to adjust the environment of the level:
A Christmas tree was added to add a wintry element to the game along with a snowy particle effect to sell the winter weather, especially as winter approaches.
Special button designs were added for the title screen to give visuals of road signs.
Another major update includes the creation of the game logo after the new name was decided.
In addition to the main menu assets, a new screen was added to show the controls of the game to the player.
Finally, a paused menu and game over menu were both designed to appear in the game upon player response, with their respective button designs.
The final music assets were created, including SFX for UI elements, ambiance SFX, and final crashing sounds.
In preparation for the final presentation, the final adjustments were made to tackle all the feedback that was previously received:
To tackle the feedback received from playtesting and the beta presentation, important text on the controls were separated from the dialogue boxes within the tutorial to allow the player to skip through the lore or text if needed while still actively learning the controls. These controls are represented at the bottom of the screen with visual animations of the corresponding controller buttons to avoid heavy reading. Although the lore dialogue boxes of the game are still text heavy, this should suffice since this part will still be skippable and won't take away from the learning curve of the controls. Numerous bug fixes were accomplished to make the requirements to proceed through the tutorial more accurate to the player's actions, and new explanations were added to the tutorial to thoroughly explain wave progression, the inventory system, and the objective of the game.
Another feature was added in response to the beta presentation feedback to give the player three chances to touch the streetcar or enemy cars before death to make the game less punishing. Through playtesting, this has proved to be useful since playtesters were able to proceed beyond wave 2 after this update.
In an attempt to address feedback for the unnatural creation of cycles for the enemies in which the testers thought the enemies should follow a type of hive knowledge, cycle detection was implemented into the project. However, this feature would vastly change the game experience and still needed polish, but there wasn't enough time before the final presentation to do thorough playtesting to understand the players' thoughts, so this feature was inevitably dropped.
With the final presentation around the corner, major feedback will be gathered from this event and further playtesting to inform the development team of important features and adjustments to make before Level Up.