Week ten updates:
In this week 10 of the semester, we have been working to tweak movement and gameplay systems. Specifically, camera changes to make the game more accessible, and attacking the person who has possession of the ball.
We aim to solve the camera controls this week because so far in playtests two big things have been eating our time: testers learning the controls, and complaints about the camera control. Thus, we hope to tackle at least the camera controls and get them to a good place before we take a tally of the information we want to convey to the player. This way we won’t go overboard on the amount of UI or other features that could possibly be solved by simply allowing the player to look around.
Our artists have made great leaps in terms of the assets that have gone in since last week – working on environment and UI to better improve the gameplay experience from just flat colors and the default skybox. These will be implemented for next week’s build, and we will continue testing visibility on the court as well as the necessary UI we will need to implement.
In order to get our camera to a place we like, we have gone all out on testing. Running playtests with other ETC students, as well as ETC faculty. This way we could test different camera control methods against each other, and see which setup worked the best for us.
From a gameplay side, we have begun fleshing out the attack/defend aspect of our game a little bit more this week: players can now do a targeted dive on the person who has possession of the ball, similar to last week, but now they have to be above the player they want to dive on. This way, we have begun to introduce more strategy in the gameplay. For now, we have held off on introducing a resource meter (like stamina) to the dive mechanic just so we can see how it feels to play the strategy of getting above other players.