Posted May 04, 2024 by Sakayo
Play tests time! Today a good non dev friend is going to playtest for me, so I wanted to prep things to be ready. I spent the morning consolidating the control scheme to be one interaction and directions and setting up a passive tutorial to explain how to interact with the game, tomorrow I plan to better set up the levels to be a bit easier to onboard and understand but it's a nice improvement. I also threw in a few sound effects to give more feedback, particularly for swinging the net and on the mini game. A nice touch (I thought) was I slowly scale up the pitch of the correct inputs making higher combos a but funner. I max out the pitch and scale of star at a certain point.
I made my first test build, had a fellow game dev playtest. He gave a lot of good feedback and pointed out some area's to spend time on with the remaining time. I spent two hours implementing most of that feedback. I tweaked a lot of the timing of things but most notably I fixed up the player controller to better animate correctly, still a bit to improve there but in general the game is feeling much better then yesterday.
With these fixed I uploaded my second build and noticed there was a devlog section on itch, so I went ahead and ported all my log notes to itch and uploaded my daily gameplay recordings.
I went through the exercise of learning how to get parent nodes (do'nt ask how I've dodged that for 3 projects) and then realized unique identifiers worked and were cleaner. So I rigged up the phantom camera to add some pizazz to things.
Hours spent: 5 hours