Devlog 1 - Game development process and playtesting

The first stage in our game development process was planning out the game concept by creating design mockups of the concept art and building a working prototype. One of the initial feedback during the planning phase was to create a storyline to match the visuals of the game to make the experience more immersive for the player. 

Our team took the feedback and refined the initial prototype while adding new features to the game mechanics for our next prototype. While planning out the story, we decided that the reason the player was in a snowy map was due to a shipwreck. This inspired us to create wood sprites to represent ship parts, which the player would collect in each level to eventually build a ship that is displayed on the win screen. We added counters for lives and number of wood collected on the canvas, so that the user could keep track of their progress. 

The game’s setting also led us to design ice and mud blocks that make the player faster or slower upon contact, as well as animals that live in freezing climates, such as penguins and polar bears. We decided that the boss in the last level would be a snowman that shoots icicles to fit the winter theme. Instead of using a traditional health bar or numerical display of the snowman’s health, we thought that the snowman losing a different part each time it loses a certain amount of HP would be an interesting way of indicating how much life it has remaining. The player will also know when they land a hit on the snowman through audio feedback and the change in color of the snowman’s sprite from white to red. Since the game's storyline involves the player building their ship before nightfall, we also designed the background to reflect the changing times of day in the game.

In the next stage of our game development process, we conducted playtesting to gather valuable feedback. The insights we received from the beta playtesting helped us to identify and address previously overlooked issues for our final prototype. One of the feedback mentioned during the playtest was updating the UI to help players navigate through Level 4. To address this issue, we included a warning sign sprite in the map to alert players of more difficult paths and routes. Another suggestion from the playtest was to add a pick-up feature that would enable the player to shoot rather than giving the player the shooting ability from the start. We took this suggestion into consideration and included the wand sprite in level 1, which also acts as a tutorial stage for players to become familiar with the controls. We received advice to change the colors of the spikes so that they match the overall color palette of the game, so we updated them as well. 

Old Spikes:

New Spikes

The playtest also let us know which platforms had collision issues with the player that needed to be resolved before the final prototype. The feedback we received allowed us to polish and refine the finer details of our game, resulting in an improved gameplay experience.