This week was a pretty busy week for all of us. Between playtesting our first playable and redefining our GDD, all of us had a lot on our plate going into and coming out of this week. For me, that meant readjusting the tileset I had created based on the playtesting we did earlier in the week.
Playtesting Session
The first thing I did this week was conduct a playtest session for our first playable. The session was conducted remotely over discord, and recorded via OBS so we could review the footage later. The session lasted for about half an hour, and provided us with valuable feedback regarding mainly the movement of our game. The feedback received in this session mirrored some of what was being said in other playtest sessions, which gave of us a sense of what direction to improve our game in going forward. In fact, perhaps the most valuable thing this session revealed was a series of bugs that affected even my art asset creation for the rest of the week.
Updated Tileset
My initial plan in terms of art this week was to complete the preliminary version of our game's chozo statue meant to hold and give the player upgraded abilities. However, after the playtesting session I conducted I realized there were some bugs in the game that the tiles I had created were the reason for. The bugs lie in collision, where the player was getting hit by spikes before even touching them. The reason for this, was because I had made the spike tiles 16 pixels wide, but only 14 pixels high. Since the level designers had programmed the hitboxes of the spikes to be the full 16 x 16 tile, this created a disparity between the size of the hitbox and the actual spike. On top of this, there was another bug that was caused by the sideways spikes being too big, resulting in the player being hit by spikes when standing on an the edge of an adjacent platform.
Knowing this, I went ahead and remade some of the spike tiles as well as adjust the corner tiles for more seamless visual effects. After completing the tileset and communicating with the level designers regarding hitboxes, we managed to mostly resolve the collision problems regarding the spike tiles found in the playtest. While I was told that I may need to adjust these tiles further depending on how development progresses, this tileset should be more or less the final tileset for the tower base level for now.
Reflection
Overall, this week was a very good week of work for all of us, with every team member communicating well with the others to create good quality work for the whole team. Since I was not able to complete the preliminary chozo statue this week, that will be part of my goal for the next week, which is more or less completing the visual look of the tower base level. Therefore, my goals for the coming week are as follows.
Complete a preliminary version of the chozo statue
Complete background environments for the tower base level
Help Herman with boss animations if I have time.
That's all from me for now, til next time.
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