For our sprint this week, our team focused on finalizing the mechanics of our game and worked to improve our user experience based off of the feedback we got during our playtest on Wednesday. A lot of the feedback we received was things to improve the quality of life for the player and to signify our mechanics better, like indications of changing game states.

In terms of development, a lot of our mechanics are in the game and have their affordances, however, because of the rush to get the mechanic done, a lot of them lack signifiers to make them feel fully complete. For example, indications of either the Yarn Trap or the Knitting Needle being deployed, better ways to communicate that the player is being seen by guards, and fixing/adding more sounds to our game were all things we needed to add to properly signify the changing states/mechanics of our game.

The Yarn Trap and Knitting Needle have had particle effects to indicate their different states. For the Yarn Trap, when placing ends of the trap down, particles spawn at where the player places down the ends. For the Knitting Needle, there are particle effects for the cat spawning, and two different responses to if the Knitting Needle hits either a non-hittable or hittable wall.

The graphic for the Guard’s field of vision has been changed to indicate when a player has been seen or not. As it is often hard to see the suspicion bar of an enemy depending on how long the FOV is or the position of the camera, it can be hard to notice when an enemy sees the player. Because of this, we could see frustrating and unintended game overs caused by lack of knowledge rather than inaction. Thus, we decided to change the field of vision to be more visually distinct and indicate changing states of the game. On top of that, instead of giving each guard their own suspicion bar, we made it so that the player has one suspicion bar over their head, so that the suspicion mechanic is always communicated to the player at all times.

Additionally, as we decided on unlocking the player controller’s directions. Now that we have the different surfaces that the Knitting Needle interacts with which serves as a restriction to the mechanic to help level design, we do not necessarily need the player controller direction to be locked to the 8 cardinal and intercardinal directions anymore. Other changes, like fixing the sound design and adding additional sounds, changing the smoothness of the camera, triggering game over if the player collides with a guard NPC, and more were also added to further cultivate our player experience.