Hello!

We've been dark for a little while now, and today we'd like to share with you some of the notes we've taken that have guided our process and decisions over the last few months! We'll summarize our major decisions from each week, as well as any pressing questions we had.

This is a compilation of notes we've taken each week that have reflected on playtesting and major design issues in our game since we last posted. Any bullet points that have a (Scrapped) tag on them indicate that we tried it and later scrapped that idea.

Feb 9, 2024:

• Gameplay is too boring - players aren't having fun scoring points
• Want to spice things up by adding other goals. 
• Settled on an "Iron Barrel", which instantly sinks the opponents ship when deposited on it. (Tried and Scrapped)
• Other small changes:
  • Want to make dash a charge-up action (Tried and Scrapped)
  • Change the kraken level to enforce that players dash over a small gap to teach them dashing (Tried and Scrapped)
  • Adding UI hovers above gold when in the gold pickup zone to indicate that the player should press "A"

Summary: We realized our gameplay wasn't grabbing players in the way we wanted it to, and explored some ideas for spicing things up (which we eventually scrapped).

Feb  16, 2024:

• Playtested Iron Barrel idea - players didn't get it
• Started working on animations for our cat character
• In playtests we discovered that players were "camping" by holding a charged dash for too long at a choke point. This was an early indication for us that charging dashes wasn't a good idea (and that the choke points in our level design were not very fun for players.
• Other small changes:
  • Added hovering indicators to show which player is P1, P2, etc...
  • Added closing white circles to direct the players interest to certain sections of the level
  • Started animating the kraken

Summary: This week we started to realize that the iron barrel wasn't a good enough fix for the problems players had, which were mainly 1. They didn't care about the objective of scoring points by stacking up gold on their boats and 2. the levels were often ending too quickly

Feb 23, 2024:

• Hard at work getting our alpha build polished and fixing bugs
• Didn't get any playtesting done during reading week as there wasn't any Game Development Club meetings.

March 1, 2024:

• This week we explored other ways of making our gameplay more interesting to players outside of them just dashing into eachother the entire game
• Came up with the idea of adding enemies that move on fixed paths and hit players away, hopefully spreading them out and preventing camping (this eventually became the penguins we have currently on level 2-1).
• We tried increasing the game timer, which didn't result in players focusing on the objective more from our playtests.
• We also started plans on a third level this week, which was intended to teach the players the dash mechanic.
• Brainstorming diagrams that can teach the players the core game rules (inspired by overcooked)

Summary: This week we were still beating our heads against the wall trying to figure out why players didn't focus on scoring points. This was before we made our key switch in design to make the game focused on destroying other players' boats.

March 8, 2024:

• This week we implemented animations for our cat character, including a walking and idle animation.
• After trying to change the game to make players focus on scoring points for weeks now, we finally realized that there were two issues with the core of the game:
  • Firstly, players would much rather sabotage each other by knocking the other players into the water than focus on scoring points. Most players said they didn't even look at the game's score.
  • Secondly, the game timer made players feel like the game would end without their input, discouraging them from taking actions toward their goal.
• We came up with a simple solution for the above problem:
  • Make the game about destroying the opponents ship rather than depositing gold into your own, and ditch the game timer. First team to sink the other team's boat wins.
  • This was by far the biggest change we made to our fundamental idea all semester.

Summary: After realizing the direction the game needed to go (bombs instead of gold) we spent a good chunk of this week planning out the new design for the game. This included health bars for the boats, and no game timer. a big change! We had to rethink the UI, the core mechanics, the movement, and the levels!

March 15, 2024:

• After changing our game's core idea, we felt that we needed to test the new idea as soon as possible
• We spent the entire weekend putting together a prototype including health bars and no game timer, with bombs that explode instead of gold.
• This week we also started plans on two ice-themed level, which would feature new visuals and slippery movement.
• We also came up with a concept for a new gameplay extension - a  cannon that can fire lit bombs over large distances.

Summary: During playtests this week, we saw an instant improvement with new players. People picked it up right away and understood the game at a glance. This was affirming; now we needed to polish this new game idea.

Cannon ice level concept drawing: 

March 22, 2024:

• After testing some of the features from last week, we discovered that players often don't realize who won after a round ended. This was indicative of two things:
  • one, winning wasn't rewarding
  • two, players weren't paying attention to their boat's health
• To fix these issues, we planned to make a level end screen which features the winning team prominently, and the losing team crying in the corner, as well as more clearly designed boat health bars, and sound effects for the bomb to indicate a hit. In addition, we planned to make animations for the boats to sway wildly when they are hit with a bomb.
• Planned to make VFX and particles for the bomb explosion to make it satisfying for players.
  
• We also had the idea to scale throwing distance slightly with movement speed, just for game feel reasons.

Summary: Moving steadily along, we started working on the plethora of features we had planned, and identified some new readability issues relating to who won each round.

Bomb vfx inspiration:

March 29, 2024:

• This week we started to see players understanding and playing the game as we had hoped. Changing the game to be about throwing bombs instead of collecting gold was a good decision, and we started to see new players actually having fun with the game.
• One player commented that the kraken didn't do anything, so we started working on making the kraken throw bombs at the players (to make it feel like a boss)
• We also made designs for a tutorial character, who would tell players the controls.
• The biggest takeaway from this week is that we needed some kind of tutorial to teach new players how to play. We realized our game relies on a lot of game literacy from other games like overcooked, so we need to make it accessible to new gamers.

Summary: The Zynga playtest was very informative, and we learned a lot about our first time user experience. We decided to make a detailed tutorial that won't let players progress until it's complete.

The tutorial character, "blubber" in his current form:

April 5, 2024

• This week we began integrating the updated UI assets that we had made to help guide players to the right places.
• We also thought about how to decorate our ice levels (2-1, and 2-2).
• We also started giving some real thought to post-processing
• Also made a plan for what features we're going to focus on for polish before the level up showcase.
• Worked on making a new water shader that shows depth underwater a bit better
• general polish work

Our decorated ice level:

for the full list of our notes, check out our meeting notes drive link here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1IuAMqwrcmOJS43oCBxLlTPcXnFSadngx?usp=sha...