For this sprint, our team focused on polish for our Alpha build.

Last week, we conducted playtests from which we got valuable feedback. While there were a lot of bugs that we encountered (which we promptly squashed), there was also feedback on the gameplay itself and different methods used to clear the game. From this information, we decided to make a few changes to our game to get it Alpha ready.

First off, we decided that the Yarn Trap change we tried out for the playtests wasn't what we wanted for the game. Additionally, players seemed to struggle to use and understand the mechanic in this format, so we tried to make the "extending a line of yarn" more clear through reverting the mechanic back to its original form, albeit with a few changes. For example, we could see players struggling a lot with knowing how long the line is, so we made it so that the player is physically restricted from walking beyond the point that the line cannot be placed to when using the Yarn Trap. This physical restriction prevents cases of player confusion and gives a clear indication of the limits of the tool. Additionally, we added more indicators to help the player understand the process of laying down Yarn Traps.

Secondly, we decided that our mechanics were too forgiving, to the extent that it interfered with the intended experience of our level design. For example, playtesters could skip parts of the level and avoid using any Tools if they were careful with their movement. To fix this, we decided for guard NPCs to be more responsive to the presence of players, turning their heads to stare at the player character if they happen to enter their view range. This makes walking past guards more difficult, which in turn encourages players to interact with the Tools to overcome challenges instead. 

Piggybacking off the second point, the Knitting Needle was also adjusted to aid this problem. The Knitting Needle, because of its lack of restrictions on its usage, could basically be used to solve any part of the level. There was no need to use stealth or use the Yarn Traps because of the Knitting Needle being too applicable to every solution, so we changed the Knitting Needle to only interact with certain surfaces, meaning that it can only be used in certain intended areas. Additionally, we made it so that the Knitting Needle hitting a guard NPC doesn't immediately give the player a game over, but instead increases their suspicion by a great amount. This was done to prevent instances of players accidentally hitting guards with the needle and then having to restart the entire level, which is something that we could see as a pain point for players.

There were other changes we made too on feedback, like how many of our playtesters reported that the walk speed of the character is incredibly slow, which made progression a drag. We increased the speed of the player and adjusted the level to prevent long stretches of the player feeling as if they're doing nothing. 

Overall, we worked hard on trying to really nail our intended experience and tried to solidify the already existing mechanics we had for our Alpha build so we could properly give an example of our game during the showcase.