Week seven update:
Week seven of our project was spent following our roadmap for halves presentations (and our next playable version of the game). Following the compiled feedback and our proposed solutions, we ranked tasks by order of importance for this week:
- UI Improvement
- Adding friction to blocks
- Visual and auditory feedback on actions: Interactable objects, stepping on checkpoints, energy bar, and tutorial dialogue (at the very least in text form that a playtest proctor can read out loud).
- Lessening the difficulty of platforming
- Creating consistency on emitter intervals
- Adding camera movement while in edit mode
The majority of these tasks work in service of making the game easier to play and more streamlined so players can more easily focus on the game rather than getting used to the interface with which to play it: we got a lot of positive feedback on the concepts, but were warned that the game was a bit tedious and punishing to play.
Keeping this feedback in mind, we also brainstormed some ideas on simplifying the puzzles by limiting the parameters and providing extra reference for movement/rules of interaction to the player. At the core of this new idea, we thought about restricting the movement and rotation of objects to planes – at least to teach players about the sorts of spatial thinking that our game would utilize, and how that mapped to computational thinking.
These are early stage ideas we’ve taken into consideration for the design of our puzzles, and we will most likely be investigating these further after halves. In the meantime, Team Parallel has been working fairly well considering the time we will have off for the next couple of weeks; we feel adequately prepared moving closer to the deadline for halves at the ETC.