Week 9 - Continuing Level Design and Refining Fidelity
This week we started adding quality of life items and more refined feedback to pull together a more cohesive game feel. We also began creating the prototype Gargoyle enemy and put together more refined tutorial level designs. On top of this, we also designed the final boss stage and planned how to code this in a way that would create a satisfying challenge for players with our short time constraint.
A lot of the quality of life and animation refinements we did this week were done in response to the playtest feedback we got the previous week and we think these will help players understand what is happening in the game a lot more and also strengthen the connection between player inputs and avatar responses. For example, now we added a flashing animation when players are hit to make it clearer when attacks successfully land from both the players and enemies.
With the creation of our gargoyle enemy prototype we've been able to figure out interesting ways to plan levels around it. For example, players will be able to use their sword form to bounce across the fireballs shot from this enemy and use that mechanic to traverse to new areas. And of course, killing and possessing this new body will provide players with even more new opportunities for traversing the world.
Lastly, as a team we ideated together to develop the boss fight level design, taking into consideration how to design the most interesting and challenging boss enemy patterns that provide lots of different ways for players to use different body mechanics to overcome the challenges. We decided to have a combination of three different attack phases that provide advantages for all three of the different bodies to attack the boss in different ways and make use of different environment areas to stay alive. Having the boss on a strict attack pattern rather than a responsive AI should allow players to become familiar with the patterns and similarly to how they learn and overcome the platforming challenges through trial and error and learning how to use different mechanics in new ways to adapt.
A lot of the quality of life and animation refinements we did this week were done in response to the playtest feedback we got the previous week and we think these will help players understand what is happening in the game a lot more and also strengthen the connection between player inputs and avatar responses. For example, now we added a flashing animation when players are hit to make it clearer when attacks successfully land from both the players and enemies.
With the creation of our gargoyle enemy prototype we've been able to figure out interesting ways to plan levels around it. For example, players will be able to use their sword form to bounce across the fireballs shot from this enemy and use that mechanic to traverse to new areas. And of course, killing and possessing this new body will provide players with even more new opportunities for traversing the world.
Lastly, as a team we ideated together to develop the boss fight level design, taking into consideration how to design the most interesting and challenging boss enemy patterns that provide lots of different ways for players to use different body mechanics to overcome the challenges. We decided to have a combination of three different attack phases that provide advantages for all three of the different bodies to attack the boss in different ways and make use of different environment areas to stay alive. Having the boss on a strict attack pattern rather than a responsive AI should allow players to become familiar with the patterns and similarly to how they learn and overcome the platforming challenges through trial and error and learning how to use different mechanics in new ways to adapt.
In the next week we will be addressing high fidelity implementation of the Player Gargoyle form, the Gargoyle enemy will be given its animations, the real game levels will be implemented according to the level designs ideated earlier, and more concrete progression of narrative will all be wrapped together into our Beta build. The Beta deadline is still two weeks away but with the Beta build created we will get some more feedback through playtesting and work on final fidelity improvements for the final submissions at the end of this course.
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