Posted February 10, 2024 by Murray_Smith
This week there were a number of updates we made to the game!
We noticed at our playtesting last week that players still had trouble figuring out the value of sabotating, even in a 2v2 scenario! We felt like a huge cause of this problem was that players felt the game was moving without them, and the timers for the boats departing was too much happening at once for the players.
To remedy this, we made it so boats no longer leave on their own after a set amount of time, and instead leave when both players board onto the boat to score points. This adds another cooperative task to the game, and makes it more clear to players what the value of sabotaging is.
Also this week we added the kraken to the game, which was an awesome feature to see!
At a certain time in the game (i.e. when 60 seconds remain) the kraken will arrive and blow up the top section of the map, forcing players to collaborate by throwing gold across the wall to their partner. We didn't have this feature fleshed out before this week's playtest, but we're looking forward to trying it out and seeing players reactions next week!
We also added an indicator for the arc of the throwing of the gold (pictured above), implemented cell shading on all our assets (pictured above) and added the water shader we've been working on to the level (pictured above).
In other news, we finished our formalized game design document this week! It was so nice to get our ideas down on the doc, and we're looking forward to implementing them.
This was a really exciting week overall! If you'd like to watch the playtesting footage, you can find it here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eMIcLghS7dhpK4mdwQP8HA22vzZPP9Nq/view?usp=shari...
That's all for us this week! See you soon!