On Week 5, the team went to their first playtest night and got plenty of feedback. They updated the game accordingly and also made significant progress in art. They also visited Xpogo again and got to see a lot of awesome tricks.
Xpogo, Round 2!
On Monday, the team visited Xpogo for the second time. We had the opportunity to witness some world-class pogo players performing advanced tricks.
The team also shared their current progress with the pogo players. They were excited to see the demo of the game.
Playtest Night #1
On Tuesday, the team went to their first playtest night. We let players tried our game on both controller and keyboard. Some important feedback we got were:
- Direction control feels inconsistent and unintuitive some times.
- The game controls feels more frustrating than fun
- Controller makes more sense than keyboard
Based on these feedback, we redesign our control scheme. Mostly, we updated the controls in the following ways:
- Primary input device would be controller. We will adapt the controls onto keyboard+mouse if time permits.
- Orientation of the pogo stick is locked to certain degrees to avoid extreme tilting angle on the pogo from the player
- The controller joystick movement maps directly to the pogo stick, instead of adding a force in a direction. This allowed for:
- More intuitive controlling mechanism. Player doesn’t feel like they’re fighting the physics anymore, but can directly control the pogo however they want.
- When player let go of the joystick, the pogo will auto revert back to upright default position, which gives more control to the player significantly.
Character Art Update
With the finished model of the character, we finished rigging and texturing of the character this week. Both the rig and texture went through several iterations to make sure that:
- Key poses can be hit during animation
- Character looks good with in-game angle, lighting and environment
Environment Art Update
In addition to making strides in character art, the team also had major update in environment art and level design. The level designers and artists on team iterated the level design to a bigger, more complicated map, with assets swapped in.
As a test, we also added coins in the environments to encourage players.
Latest Demo
By the end of week 5, we were able to integrate the environment art and new control schemes into our new tutorial level.
Next steps:
- Integrate character into the game.
- Polish level environment with lighting and textures