We made a lot of progress this week with building our first prototype. Throughout the week, our programming team successfully laid out our game's foundation, having coded the core mechanics and scene-switching that we needed for the playable. They also continued to work on our secondary mechanics such as tossing and inventory mode, the latter of which was also implemented into the deliverable for this week. Simultaneously, our visuals team created character, object, and environment assets to be used for the prototype, which will be further refined and improved for upcoming milestones. We were also able to integrate sound effects and enemy-player detection (through sight), however, we do plan on enhancing and completing these interactions to intensify the experience of playing our game. Besides the actual prototype, we organized our design modifications and playtesting session findings in our refined document and playtesting report to be submitted this week.
Throughout the development of the prototype, we had plenty of discussions addressing some points that were crucial to the implementation of our mechanics and assets. For instance, the visual perspective of the environment had to be deliberated thoroughly as we wanted to showcase enough depth in our maps despite the fact that our game is in 2D. We had to ensure that the appearance of our maps did not interfere with the way our game functioned.
All in all, our prototype so far reflects a milder version of the gameplay we intend for players as the primary focus for this playable was to see whether or not our core mechanics worked. Playtesting sessions reflected our own issues with the prototype, such as its lack of enjoyment and rewarding challenges, but we believe this to be a fixable issue as we intend for the final game to have more for the players to do wherever they go in the map. It will consist of more narrative-driven points, meaningful collectibles, better ambience, smoother interactions, and harder obstacles, all of which will be aspects of the game that we will continue to work on in the coming weeks.
