Had my brother do one playtest during the weekend. His insights were very helpful and watching him was very informative. Overall there was lots I need to change, fix, and improve. Starting with the tutorials since it is the introduction of the player to the way of the world I needed it to be more informative without being too overwhelming. There needed to be ways to put the memory of the mechanic into the player’s head. That way the player can remember what it does by interacting with the world and not having to keep in mind what the tutorial text said word for word. Upon advice from my brother I made it that there was no separate input/button for saving, by interacting with the savepoint you can easily save. This is a huge change because it frees up one input which can be used for other mechanics I will later on introduce.
There were some issues with the physics objects which there will usually be because physics in games can’t always be reliable because of so many interacting rules. I made sure the light turns off eventually so the objects don’t stay lit up for too long. I also fixed the puzzle in the level. It seemed that there wasn’t enough hints to how to solve it, and it was a bit too vague. I have made it more obvious if not a bit too obvious now. But that’s fine because it’s only the intro stage.
I also made an effect to the resource bar to indicate whether or not there is enough resource for the action the player is doing such as healing or blocking. It still needs a specific UI effect when it’s empty but since it’s a placeholder I won’t worry too much about it right now. Fixed the speed of the shield coming out and some logic that was getting in the way of pulling it out. Now it’s much easier to use the shield. Updated the animation for the lantern and added effects as well to make it more obvious that you are trying to heal. I will update it again tomorrow to make it look better.
For some of the tutorials to really stick to the mind of the player there needed to be updates to the practice dummy so it could punch and deal damage. I added animation and logic so that it would deal a small amount of damage to the player. It was of course the player’s choice if they would heal from this damage, but at least they are faced with the idea of healing. I added more tutorials as well that weren’t just about the controls but specific mechanics such as the Primelight resource. This was needed because some messages were too lengthy.
The tutorials were a bit annoying in that they would open constantly whenever the player would run into them if they loaded in a new game. So I added new data and logic to make sure it knew which tutorials had been read. I ran into an issue of an infinite loop. A problem I hadn’t had in a long time, since I started coding. It took awhile but after some plugging and playing I realized that the way the level was loading and setting up had the loops connected to each other. They didn’t flow to the next one when finished, they sort of played at the same time, looping over one another again and again. It was fine until I added another loop with the tutorials so it became too taxing. I fixed it by making sure it went over to the next loop only when the current loop was done. Updated the logic on the Cottage level too so it doesn’t suffer the same issues.
I noticed the health bar of the player wouldn’t appear even if they were getting hit so I added simple logic for that. And then I updated the whip logic to make it way more fun and efficient. The objects should pull towards the player if they try to pull an object and don’t move the crosshair, that was my brother’s suggestion as well. It made sense and realized it should have been in the game all along. It could be useful to pull objects towards you.
After some thinking I used two vectors and compared them to see whether or not the player was moving the camera a significant amount. Since there are two line traces, the first when the player uses the whip and the next after the slow motion effect is finished, it is easy enough to check if they are of similar values. I use that for this logic, although I may come up with something else later so the player can choose to instead always guarantee pulling an object towards themselves.
Adjusted the required velocity on the objects as well so they deal damage more consistently, and adjusted the trace of the whip so it hit more consistently. I also found the whip wasn’t attaching to the right place so I had to fix that by making sure the location of the trace was updated on the right place. Originally it was attaching to the center of any object it hit if it wasn’t an enemy. I had wondered why it stretched so far out before but I finally found out why.
The boss requires a lot more updates and fixes for sure. There was a big spaghetti for his heal, lots of unnecessary logic. It checked whether or not the boss was at half health which was useless because the healing ability is only available when the boss is at half health so I scrapped all that and just made it a simple heal. Worked on the stun/stagger animation as well so it plays the whole way through. Still haven’t gotten it working consistently because the hit/damage montages are interrupting it. Tomorrow I’ll work on fixing that and more.
GoldenGratus Games 