Hello!
This week only consisted of three core days due to CMU’s Spring Carnival happening from Thursday through the weekend. Our primary goal was to consolidate feedback from playtest day and plan out our next steps, especially the steps leading to Softs. I’ll break down some of the feedback and how we are responding to it below:
3D Environment
In order to try to focus players on just the play space, the exterior areas that previously only provided theming and flavor were removed, as shown in the image below.
Control Scheme
Another piece of feedback we had received was that while the general knowledge our game was trying to help cultivate was present throughout the whole game, some portions of the game weren’t having the player play in a very unified way.
Specifically, for playtest day, to beat our playtest phase, players would want to look at their phones and talk about what information the players individually had access to, while having very little focus on the shared screen. When we jumped to the play phase, the phone became a controller that occasionally featured information, but now the shared screen was the main point of focus. We wanted to create a more unified vision, so Xiunan, Sarah, and Jingyuan worked on how best to align those two phases.
The decision that was made was to use players’ phones almost entirely as controllers for the whole game so that ideally they would be looking up and communicating, not looking down at their phones. This meant that the play phase had some changes to maintain players attention on the shared screen and the tutorial phase was redesigned to use joystick movement.
For the tutorial phase, as opposed to choosing a specific number to order themselves, players move left and right to sort themselves based on the tutorial level, as shown in the video below.
