On week 12, the team mainly prepared for the Soft Opening. They went to their fourth playtest night on Tuesday, and also hosted a playtest event on Friday to gain more feedback.
Playtest Night #4
We went to Playtest Night again on Tuesday night. Since not a lot of people showed up, we had only a few playtesters. We gained super positive feedback on our character art and animation, environment art, stylized shader, soundtrack and gameplay. Professor Michael Christel was also at the playtest and was our first playtester of the night. He mentioned it’s “A game I want to borrow a controller from Steve to play in my office”.
We also observed players to find areas we can improve on:
- Player sometimes forget they can flip or boost.
- Bounce back feedback laggy
- Right joystick needs to be specified in more detail for the advanced trick tutorial
Gameplay Update
We officially added the time event to “race home” after the performance , which means we finished the whole game flow this week (woohoo!) The player now can have the full experience of
menu-> intro comic-> tutorial -> collecting props and outfit -> enter performance -> race home -> ending comic
The full demo video shown below:
(The ending video is a place holder)
Even Fancier Performance Stage!
We added fireworks and more lighting to the performance stage! There are also stationary and moving platforms to spice up the pogoing and tricks.
If you look closely, you can also find the water bottle, spray can, camcorder and speakers you collected near the stage during the performance.
Even More UI Improvements!
Based on Playtest Feedback, we once again updated to UI to help guide the players more. In particular, we’re giving more detailed instructions on how to obtain outfit pieces.
Our first iteration:
During playtest on Tuesday, we observed that some players interpreted it as press right joystick and direction button together. Therefore we made another update:
Even More Environment Art!
We broke the fourth wall by putting Pogo Fest posters around the environment 🙂
Wall Jump
We started experimenting with wall jump mechanics.
Initially, players must press LT at the right time to trigger a wall jump (or a grinding too). We later changed both wall jump and grinding to be automatic to make it easier for the players.
Friday Self-Hosted Playtest Event
On Friday, we hosted a Playtest Event for all ETC students interested in participating.
We had about 25 play testers, and almost all players made it to the end of the game without any outside instruction, which is a significant improvement from Week 10 Saturday Playtest. This proves that the changes we’ve made do help make the game more self-explanatory and intuitive.
We received overwhelming positive feedback and support for the game. We also observed some areas to improve on:
- Players have difficulty knowing where “home” is during the timed event
- -> We then added a “Home tag” at the destination to guide the players
- Advanced trick registers as “finished” too late, and players tend to think they’re done with the trick and let go before it’s actually finished
- -> Updated the advanced tricks to register faster
- Grinding can’t be broken out of
- -> To be updated next week.
Next Steps:
- Brace for Soft Opening