This week for our sprint our team worked a lot on bug fixing and making changes to our game based off of playtest feedback.

Last week, we collected a lot of feedback thanks to the playtests conducted after class. Because we knew our game needed to be ready for the beta, our team focused our efforts on doing a lot of bug squashing and responding to what we decided was the most important feedback to act on. Despite most tasks this week being smaller tasks, we still knew it was going to be a loaded sprint and prepared ourselves for such.  Because of this, we needed to prioritize what would be essential for our beta build showcase.

A lot of our changes were polishing up our graphics by adding animations and adding in finalized assets. The 3D models and menus both have implemented custom assets and are animated at this time, though we are still looking to polish up the animation trees and make them look snappier to the eye. We arted up some of the levels and added shaders to our game to solidify the look of our game, though they’re subject to change in terms of pure graphic fidelity.

Additionally, we got feedback on the intuitiveness of our game’s graphics, like the tools properly communicating what they did on the HUD, or how the guard vision cones would cover up important information on screen, like the cat or the Knitting Needle. Things like this inconvenienced the player in frustrating ways, so we thought acting on feedback with regard to player quality of life was important.

There were major issues with building our game that we needed to figure out before the week’s end, so there were some tasks that were higher priority than others to have our build work. We ended up having our hands full with work, but we ended up managing the most important tasks that would make our game unable to be played smoothly through in one shot if not resolved. While our game still has polishing to be done, and some of our tasks are being carried on from the previous week, our game is beta-ready.

As we believe we’ve figured out our major issues with our game and have figuratively sanded out most of the hard edges, we can work on the more minute detail and fixing up parts of the game that were considered less essential than any game-breaking bugs.