Design Blog 6

For this sprint, I worked on texturing, adding the final terrain in Unity, playtesting our newest build, and getting feedback from playtests. The first thing that I did was texture the medium sized models, a food stand, a tractor, and a carnival ride. It was decided to put them all on the same UV set since they were roughly the same size. The UV set was a little finicky, the tracker had a lot of small pieces that didn’t want to work without some additional adjustment. Once I started texturing, I started with the carnival ride, since it’s the one model that I made myself. I found that I wanted to add a base steel texture since it’s a metal carnival ride. Then I decided to alternate the color between red and blue, since that felt like a very carnival like color scheme. Then I added a basic soft yellow plastic texture to the seats, and a dark rubber texture for the ropes connecting the seats to the ride. I didn't add any other details, because it was supposed to be a background prop, and lots of detail wouldn’t show up very well.

The next thing that I textured was the food stand. The reference we had for the stand was very simple, just red and white stripes. I messed around with adding a cloth texture at first but decided that it would look better with a much simpler matte texture.

Then I moved on to the tractor. I approached it the same way I did the carnival ride, with a simple metal texture as a base, and changed the color of certain areas based on the reference.

I also worked on getting a final version of the terrain for our level. We’ve been using a placeholder up till now. I wanted to use the terrain editing tool in Unity to make the terrain, since I’ve used it before, and I know I can get pretty good results from it. First, I applied the dirt texture I made in the previous sprint before editing the terrain, since it’s much easier to see what I’m editing with a texture on it. I wanted to try and make the terrain more like shallow hills rather than the steep mountain-like placeholder that we currently have.

As for the playtest feedback, I got a good number of playtesters over the course of the sprint. The main thing that I wanted from this playtest was to find out both how complete the most recent build of the game is and how the overall balance is. I got fairly definitive results on both, the majority of playtesters seemed to think that the game was complete. But the majority also thought that the time between targets being thrown was too short. That just reinforced my own feelings about the targets from my own playtesting. One of the core elements of the gameplay I envisioned early on was that the targets would be thrown in pairs, with no more than one pair of targets on the screen at any one time, to give the player as much time as possible to hit each target. Some of the target pairs spawn too close together currently and need to be delayed. Some of the target pairs also fly outside of the players arc of fire too quickly, not giving them enough time to hit them, so those need to be adjusted to either spend more time inside the players arc of fire, or end inside the players arc of fire. Overall, it seems like small adjustments are all that we need to make.