Coming back from our first playtest on our client’s campus, we started putting stuff in our game. During this week, we didn’t go to playtest again, since we would like to focus on development.
3D Art:
Emily kept working on the spaceship. During the first playtest, we showed the spaceship to the students there, but only 50% of students could correctly tell which side is front and which side is back, which indicated that our design was not clear. To address the problem, Emily added details on spaceship’s window to make it clear. And she also worked on the detailed texture.
2D Art:
During the first playtest, Sophia asked about the user interface design, and regarding the feedback, she started making the UI for lobby scenes and defender and engineer roles, as well as modified an icon for striker. In addition, she designed the UI for ultimate skills and progress bar.
Gameplay:
In our demo for quarter, we just implemented a striker role with very basic networking functions, because without engineer, we couldn’t actually make ultimate skills work. Therefore, Feiran actually started working engineer role. First, he gave the engineer the ability to create crystals and distribute to teammates. Then he implemented the function that enabled sharing crystals. Lastly, he created a beta version of enemy, which very slowly flied toward the player and after passing by, they never come back.
Network:
To enable players to join the game together, we first adopted Unity’s lobby system, but later on we realized that we couldn’t use it anymore because it prevents players to join after the game starts. This is unacceptable because Unity’s networking is very fragile. Considering our target players who are very easy to be frustrated, re-connection function is one of the most important features. Therefore, we abandoned Unity’s lobby system and started making our own lobby system. Eric worked on the lobby scene very hard. He first implemented the UI interaction in that scene, including selecting difficulty and select roles. In addition, he achieved the basic version of network support without re-connection.