Week 11 - Beta Playtests

This week the game made more leaps towards completion. The full implementation of the Player Gargoyle form made its debut with its sword drop stab and fireball shooting abilities. After playtesting we realized that more varied benefits could be provided to the raw sword form to make it an almost equally viable option for players to beat the game by implementing a bounce off spikes ability, and also built out 3 full levels. In addition, more art assets were created to bring more life to the levels and introduce the player's NPC comrade that helps guide the player through the tutorial and overarching game narrative.

With the Beta build completed we conducted 4 playtests following the same environment setup and question and answer format. Once again we gained new and more insightful feedback and luckily a lot of it appears to be very feasible to implement in our remaining time to add these final bits of improvement.

In the coming week, we'll be dividing up work in two main areas: one half of the group will be focusing on creating the boss level and boss enemy AI as this is the final climax of this truncated version of the game that will be testing and rewarding the players who overcome the entire game experience. The other is adding more visual fidelity elements and bug fixes to complete the game feel with the implementation of more thoughtful and detailed GUI elements, particle feedback items, and fixing other remaining physics bugs to create an even smoother gameplay experience that doesn't have bugs that break immersion.