Adding Checkpoints to the Levels

At the beginning of the week my group and I decided to make longer levels, a reason for this is that we only aim to have two levels and as such they will need to be a bit longer. As a result of this discussion, I realized that we needed a “checkpoint” system so that the player won’t have to restart from the beginning of the level if they die. Since the programmers already had their hands full with fixing & polishing […]

Interpreting Feedback and Implementing Fixes

During the last playtest session, most of the feedback we got was related to the movement. Some found it pretty easy to use and liked the way it worked, while others found themselves hitting walls constantly. As a result of this, identifying the problem was relatively hard.
The way we decided to try and mend the problem without completely redoing the movement, since a lot of people liked it, was to start of by fixing the stone walls since we knew there were […]

Redesigning the Power-ups

This week my team and I decided to cut some planned features, so that we instead can focus on improving the ones we have. One of the features we cut was boss battles, since they take a lot of time to “get right”. This feature cut freed up a lot of time so we thought of swapping the power-up system we had for one that was a bit more nuanced. That system is what I will be discussing below.
During one of […]

Preparing for the End of the Alpha Phase

This week marked the end of the alpha phase of the project. As a result, I haven’t been focusing on any single design task, but more on designing a level that demonstrates our work on the project so far and I’ve also been helping out with implementing assets.
On Monday there was a playtest session, where every team could show their game and let other teams play them and give feedback. This was really helpful, because it turned out that no one really found […]

Designing Levels outside of an Engine

During the last couple of weeks, one of the things I’ve done is make drafts for various types of levels. As the game is still in the early stages, making these drafts has been relatively difficult. The main reason for this difficulty has been due to not knowing exactly how the enemies/objects will function. The way I dealt with this problem was by making multiple simple drafts rather than having one that is filled with detail, but would end up getting […]