WEEK 12 – POLISHING

One week before Thanksgiving, our team is polishing the experience and received more feedbacks from playtest.

Art

This week, our artists were working with programmers on tweaking the animation sequence and also figuring out where and what needed to be changed.

Based on the feedback that we got from playtests, we decided to make the human look more remorseful after he tricked the player. Thus, we changed our human-walk-away animation. In the current version, that human will kneel down, say “Thank you (sigh) Good luck”, slowly stand up, awkwardly going backwards for a few steps before he nervously runs away.

We also made some more animations for the creature, including adding more eye animations so that it could have more expressions. For example, it will look at you and blink when it wants the flower, it will have smiling eyes and jump when it is happy, and etc.

For the child part, we are considering letting him wandering around before he gets close to the creature, which we will be doing in the coming week.

Programming

This week, in programming part, we modified the monster AI. The monster will not come too close to player now, we are planning to do AB test about the monster next week. Also for the monster scene, we have color changes after the transformation to make it more dark and scary.

For the beginning scene, we have modified the creature material so that it will not bloom before the fog fade out. We add some fog above the creature at the beginning so that it will not be attractive at all.

Since now, we have the new animation of creature and human, we integrate them into our engine, create new animation state machines and figured out how to import animations with blend shapes. Apart from animation, we also integrate the sound effects including 3 BGM and new human voice into the scene.

Playtesting

We have 7 playtesters this week, 2 of them had no experience of VR. All of them had completed the story without difficulty and 6 of them understood the story without being told the story at first. One player realized that he was the creature after transformation but didn’t understand the latter part of the story.

Asking about the emotion towards different stages of the story, 5 of them felt curious and confusion during the transformation,  5 of them feel scared during the monster scene, while none of them felt the dilemma in the end. The reason for that is most player felt like they didn’t have a choice and it was the natural thing occur them to do so. Also one of the playtesters didn’t recognize the model was a child. Most players suggest that we need to implement some kind of interaction with the child to make the ending more rich.

Next

For next week, we are going to focus more on polishing the final scene and fix all the jarring part of the game. We are actively working towards soft!