Week 07

This week as we prepared for our Halves presentation, the team took great leaps in defining gameplay. For reference, here’s a video of our build at the end of Week 07:

After playtesting last week, we decided to test the Tornado’s functionality this week in our playtesting build. For now, it is surprising players. Its functionality is quite bare but players seem excited to play with the tornado, and Varun is excited to keep improving the gameplay features of this environmental hazard. The level now has new rules that prevent the player from moving the Fortress up to many tiles at once, sending survivors down too many tiles at once, and new “Water” tiles that prevent the player from sending Survivors to deep water tiles, though the Fortress can go down onto these tiles.

We also implemented a “Play” and “Pause” button for players to be able to better control the day’s timer. Initial playtest results have complimented this new feature, though some players seem to forget the function is there altogether, so some more iteration on this feature will attempt to make it a more easily accessible button.

On the Art implementation side, Healthy is cleaning up the final UVs for the inner Fortress models, and Keran is working to help Healthy finish up these art assets so she can model a new oil plant she got excited about in the art documentation. More on this next week!

The next bit of gameplay that is to be implemented is the Survivor’s energy bars, which prevents the player from sending the same Survivor over and over, and adds another layer of resource management to the gameplay. This Energy will add another dimension of humanity to our characters, as they will go from states like “Determined” to “Tired” as they do excessive amounts of work. Feeding a Survivor will also boost their Energy meter, though we are not sure if allowing the player to decide who eats is within scope of the project…

Next week is also halves, so as a team we discussed whether we should show a live demo of our game or not. We have decided against this since most of the work up to this point has been on the back end, and most of the art assets are not implemented in a way that most of the team would feel happy to present yet. Thus, we have decided to record snippets of gameplay that we feel can present our work in an interesting way that properly conveys the amount of blood, sweat, and tears (of joy) we are putting into the game.