Design Sprint: 5

Overview

• During last week’s pilot playtest feedback, we had a lot of observations and feedback from our naive testers about game control, gameplay mechanics, onboarding process, and UI.
• Our main goals for this week:
  • Implement the first version of the Candy Kingdom environment
  • Increase the number of candies and refine the perceptual features of candies.
  • Iterate story
  • Add SFX and Background Music to reinforce the theme

Prototype

You can find our prototype for this week at the link below! If you’re playing on a single computer for both players, be sure to mute one of the tabs to prevent sound overlap.

Test Link: https://moontwist11.itch.io/hai-v31

Password: haihai

Adding in Story…

In the previous week’s meetings, we were able to get strong approval from our client with regard to our gameplay. We spent this week focusing on finalizing the story for our game and integrating the theme throughout the world by adding sound and art assets. 

The game takes place in a Candy Kingdom setting where they are preventing the spread of bitterness to the Candy citizens. Players must visit houses in each of the various neighborhoods in the kingdom and find as many Bitter Candies as possible before the day ends!

Art Updates

3D Environment Update

At the end of this week, we had our first version of the Candy Kingdom landscape.

2D Art: Candy Generator

After playtesting in the last sprint, we found: besides our time limitation, our 8 types of characters are not enough for players to learn attributes for categorization. So we decided to expand our characters pool to 60-80  so our players will hardly find any repeated candies. 

To quickly make 70 candies, we decided to

• Design perceptual features
• Use a procedural way to assemble perceptual features into candies
• Split candies into 2 folders based on classification rules

Sound Updates

This week, our team worked on adding sounds to our game. Our main priorities were:

• Using BGM to clearly convey the feel/theme of each neighborhood and ensure they are easily distinguishable by the players
• Using SFX to clearly convey feedback as the players interact with the game and the world

We finished the first iteration of all core neighborhood BGM and SFX, along with Audio Managers within the game to handle all transitions. 

For our BGM design, we aimed to have a common theme throughout the entire world but have the tone/instrumentation to give each neighborhood a distinctive feel. When moving in/out of each neighborhood, these tones should fade in/out accordingly. Our four main themes were:

• Gift Candy: Christmas/Winter theme, but also a very classy vibe. More classical/orchestral music used
• Dessert: Soft, sweet, light and bouncy. Very soft attacks in instrumentation
• Sour Candy: Cool, “skatepark” vibe. Techno music
• Candy Snack: Summer party vibe. Very EDM-like music

You can find our version one samples of each BGM track in the following folder: BGM – Google Drive

Next Week, Maybe… 

Finalize integration of assets into the game

Conclude everything we did so far into half presentation

Rehearsal for half presentation