Developmemt Process

We merged three characters into one platform for the 1st week of cooperation. Ethan’s character has some difficulties merging, so we spent a lot of time troubleshooting his code. Meanwhile, we discussed the game theme and primary art style for the following week. In the end, we decided to follow the style of cooperation and boss battle games. We want to develop a warm and simple environment to encourage the players to cooperate within the game to improve the bonding relationship between players. 

For the 2nd week, we started out Beta version of the game. Peilin created the major scene for level 1 and drew the harmful falling objects for the scene. You Jin provided a fabulous idea for level 2 accompanied with high-fidelity 2D assets. The puzzle-solving-driven idea in level 2 pushes the players forward on their cooperation level. Ethan came up with the boss battle scene for level 3. His goal is to merge the harmful elements from the previous two levels into level 3’s boss attacking routine. He created the original assets for the boss. Overall, You Jin created all the environmental assets on all three levels to settle down the tone of each battles' theme. The following sketches, from left to right, are for level 1, level 2, and level 3. 

We were ambitious with our ideas, and therefore, during the Beta version development, we could not finish our second and third levels. At the same time, we noticed that Windows and Mac OS Unity could not cooperate reasonably. Hence, we decided to work on a single computer instead of working separately and then merging. Each character has a different control code, so it was harder to manage the gaming system. Peilin was in charge of the game manager, and the significant interaction happened in level 1. Later, You Jin polished the code and merged her level 2 game interaction into the chain. We ran out of time and were able to provide major gameplay without any further polish for the in-class showcase. We were also unable to reach level 3, which made Ethan’s idea come to reality.

After hearing back from class and instructors John, we knew that we would have a heavy week wrapping this game up. First of all, we included a menu and title scene for the game to lead players to get into the major gameplay. At the same time, we created hint guidance for each level. We intentionally only provided simple and visual-based guidance and left some in-game experiences as a myth to give the rights to players to explore. Besides including beginning and ending scenes, we also further polish our levels. For level 1 gameplay, we added more depth to the cooperation and puzzle-solving process. We figured out how to merge the boss battle into the current level instead of adding extra workload.

Playtesting Notes:

The playtesting of our game majorly happened on 4/6/2022 in class. We showcased the game in class and heard back from our classmates. Here are the observations and feedbacks: 

1. Observations:

-Some Players seemed to have difficulties finding goals in the first level. This might be because we did not add the instruction at the beginning of the game.

1. Feedbacks: 

• should give the movement instruction at the beginning of the game
•  In level one if would be nice to have a protection zone where bomb won't hurt the player 
• Items are similar to falling enemies - should make the items visible or change the enemy(like a fireball /something threatening) 
• In level 1, add coop puzzles like level 2 for the level one to find & collect the items 
• change the inputs 
• Scene Manager 
• finish the level 3