Week 10 - Approaching Beta

Week 10! Only a few weeks left. It's been an intense grind to design, develop, text, and iterate our project over the past several weeks but things have been coming together in the end. This week we iterated on more level designs and began building them out more in the actual game. Some time was also spent focusing on implementing a checkpoint system, revisiting connecting dungeon rooms, and adding destructible environment obstacles to add more varying challenges and secrets inside our level designs. On the visual assets side we created the final visual assets for the Gargoyle enemy and Player form and also did some explorations on the visual design language for how our UI will communicate.

These additions have really helped create a more complete game sense for casual play tests we've conducted and helped us gain more insightful feedback focusing on things like difficulty of the level design and discovery of mechanics rather than commenting on missing feedback or more aimless experimentation environments.

For the next week we will be putting the final touches on our Beta game build and running playtests to gain more detailed feedback for the final weeks of iteration. It may become challenging to manage game assets and build versions this week because some of the changes are fidelity changes updating physics that span across multiple scripts so merging updates together isn't as simple as changing one prefab or script all the time. But everyone on the team has become very familiar with Unity and the aspects most closely related to the areas of the game we each focus on like animation, object physics, particle effects, etc. and the team's continued strong communication skills and ability to meet in-person should definitely help us stay on top of the coming challenges.