Week 5 - Before Mid Mortem
After our final week of prototyping, we were given two weeks to refine one of the games that we’ve been working on leading up to the Mid Mortem presentation. The Mid Mortem presentation is an event at which all of the Production II teams will present the games they’ve been polishing to the Champlain Game Studio Junior class. Then we will decide which games will continue for further development and which games will be cut.
For the first week of polishing Potion Seller, my team focused on the experience of the game. This required more work on the potion crafting system, more dynamic customers, and testing of the current level. We decided that we didn’t want to add many new mechanics into the game because with our relative unfamiliarity with Unreal and the presentations coming up, we thought it was more important to perfect what we currently have instead.
Overall Improvements:
More streamlined potion making system
Customer orders and movement
Improved platforming and environment
My Contributions:
Level QA and complete redesign
Stand in environment props
Presentation formatting and practice
VDD
My focus was iterating on the level. I was very unhappy with the level I had in place and I wanted to test it to see how players thought it could be improved. After I got feedback that confirmed by suspicions of the platforming feeling arbitrary, I decided to rebuild the level from scratch, paying extra attention to lining the geometry up correctly and uniformly, making the platforming more necessary, and getting more of a feel of a wizard’s tower. After that, I spent a lot of time working on the theme of the presentation, making sure it was consistent, coherent, and supported the fantasy of our game. Finally, I focused on on-boarding documents if our game goes through, like the VDD. Before Mid Mortem tomorrow, I will be practicing the presentation more.
I am really excited to see everyone’s games tomorrow and I hope that Potion Seller will be able to continue development!
