Overview
- Prototypes
- Playtest Night
- Challenges
- Next Week’s Goals
Prototypes
The focus for this week was prototyping playable mechanics for playtest night in Weeks 6 and 7 leading up to Halves. On the backend, we first implemented manager scripts that manage the input processing on the phone, keeping track of when the player taps on the screen, as well as what kind of action they performed (a tap vs. a swipe).
As we moved away from the toll collecting mechanic from last week, the next gameplay mechanic that we prototyped was chopping down trees, which we wanted to allow players to do either by tapping (with an axe) or by swiping (with a saw). We implemented a working version of the prototype as well as a small demo scene that could be shown at playtest night.
We kept the dialogue system and wrote some test dialogue for the horse, as well as dialogue options that the player could choose in response. At the current stage of what we have, one interesting story direction that we want to follow is the idea of animals being treated differently than people (and being valued very highly) on the National Road. Our sample dialogue in our demo scene has the horse reflect on their comfortable sleeping conditions, while the human NPC talks about how stuffy and cramped is it when they stay at an inn or tavern along the road.
Finally, we made some improvements to the mechanic from last week of spawning an AR scene on top of the ground, based on the amount of ground that is actually detected in front of the player, and we assembled a sample town scene with the Wild West asset bundle buildings and some wagons that the player could explore.
Playtest Night
We attended playtest night on Tuesday, where we showed our three demo scenes to players and had them try out all three core mechanics. From this session, we learned that players enjoyed the interaction of tapping to chop the trees, and they also thought the animation of the horse talking was entertaining. However, the dialogue was too long, making it difficult to read, and the interactions needed more visual feedback to be properly communicated.
Challenges
While the mechanics that we have implemented are functioning, they both have a lot of limitations and need to be strongly improved upon, especially visually. When rendering the big scene with many buildings outside, if there are other buildings or trees around, like in the area right in front of Hunt Library, the in-game environment will suffer from a lot of clipping due to occlusion. For the tree chopping scene, building for a mobile device means we are severely limited in the number of high-poly trees with branches that we can render. At the moment, players can look up and see that they are chopping down a lot of bare logs that are filling the space in a supposed thick forest.
Going into the week of halves, we also still have a lot to do ahead of us in terms of narrowing down a very specific direction and vision for what this project will become in the second half of the semester, and it has been challenging so far for us to find a path that seems particularly promising as an engaging and functioning experience that meets the project goals.
Next Week’s Goals
- Iterate upon and refine a build for playtest night on main campus again next week
- Polish a build, gameplay demo video, and slideshow for Halves presentation