For this week’s sprint, our team focused on polishing our main gameplay while preparing other core elements of our game, such as the UI systems and tutorial.

As we had finally solidified our main gameplay elements (Tools), our development has switched to focusing on other aspects of our game. There were lots we hadn’t properly touched on yet, like properly making the User Interfaces, like our title screen and pause menu, or properly making a tutorial. While we planned to eventually make one, we identified the lack of tutorial as the biggest point of confusion/frustration for our previous players, and thus it would be a priority as this week we were going to test with the Ubisoft ambassadors to properly receive feedback on our game loop.

We designed our tutorial with the intent of showcasing all of our mechanics and the possible applications. There were a few ways we brainstormed that the tutorial could work, like a testing room where player’s could freely explore the mechanics, or a text tutorial to explain the mechanics as the player starts the game before letting them play the levels. The method we decided on was a sectioned tutorial that explains mechanics to the player, and instructs them to test them out before proceeding to the next part of the tutorial. The reason we made our game this way is that we know previous testers have had issues understanding how our mechanics or how to use them, so explaining it to them in both a textual and practical manner would help them proceed with the rest of the game.

As we had the main gameplay set in place, a lot of our focus went to creating user interface screens that would allow the player to navigate the screens of the game easier and make the overall user experience better, such as a pause screen. We started making custom assets for these screens and started putting down the basis for them. We plan to animate these screens in the future, but for now, they are functional and serve their purpose.

On top of that, we’ve been working towards preparing the ending sequence and have been redesigning/adjusting our current levels. While we are satisfied with the overall state of our levels, we had previously gotten feedback on how the Tools of our game weren’t all necessary for the progression, which made some of them feel useless or redundant. While we want to allow the player to occasionally have different ways to approach each challenge, we wanted all parts of our game to be engaging and for the player to think about both Tools when progressing the game. We’ve also added a Guard “hearing radius” to help avoid edge cases of players being able to using all the Tools, so players cannot simply easily sneak past guards to avoid sections that require the player to use the Tools to  progress. The ending sequence is to finish off the story and hopefully add to the overall experience of the game, and is still being planned out at this point.

Overall, our game is steadily coming together, although we still have steps to make towards our final version.