Week 8 was our second heavy sprint development week, focusing on the implementation of new features. It involved the integration of two development tracks.

Examine and Analyze

While we had set out a rigorous and ambitious plan for new features during our rescoping exercise in week 7, several new features and mechanics emerged, which were evaluated and placed in the backlog.

With only two code sprints remaining, our focus had to be on the core game loop to ensure it was fun and engaging to get some player feedback.

The second codebase had not been checked into Git, had no camera movement, no prefabs, no click colliders, and used an entirely and incompatible input system. These issues had to be fixed to merge the code bases and re-committed to GitHub, possibly setting our development back by more than a full sprint.

Additional optimizations had to be made, including switching out the camera to support pixel-perfect scaling. For a pixel art game, pixel scaling has to be pixel aligned. Other optimizations, including disabling sprite scaling and compression, configuration prefabs for common objects, click colliders and fixes to the isometric tilemap, also chewed into development time, all of which were unplanned.

I implemented some features, including adding wood to the fire and integrating the pixel emitters for the fire trails. I also spent time working with the other developers on Git best practices and ensured that they were comfortable with using a shared Git instance in the future.

With this in mind, I set up a Unity cloud build continuous integration so that both windows and mac binaries would be produced and presented to the team for continuous playtesting, which has been positively received.

In my previous game design, I set out to use procedural content generation to create the level. However, this leads to several issues, specifically relating to “good” level design not happening randomly.

This being the first time I was going to curate a level by hand, I reviewed the original level design content from module 720 as a jumping-off point (Lobb 2021)

I can use denial and reward to direct attention (Frederick 2007) by limiting the interesting objects in the player starting location and providing a trail of painted rocks to draw the player towards the first camp. It gave the player a brief introduction to the environment and a mechanic that we will use later in the game.

An attempt was also made to use spatial audio to direct the player towards the campfire. However, this was not effectively implemented and did not test well.

Learnings and Actions

After setting up the continuous integration builder, I was impressed with how effective it was to provide a fresh build to the team whenever I implemented a new feature. In a survey of Game Jam participants, continuous integration is listed as the most important (M. Borg et al. 2020), with version control being in 4th position. Unfortunately, my attempts to get the team to use version control has so far been unsuccessful.

The indy game genre often lends itself to solo developers or symbiotic relationships. One team member focuses on the development side, while others provide art, marketing, or game design skills. (GDC 2016a, 2016b; Noclip 2019, 2020)

Playtesting showed that the denial and reward and guiding players using interesting things worked, and no prompting was required to find the main camp.

References

  • ADAM MILLARD - THE ARCHITECT OF GAMES. n.d. Leveling Up Progression Systems [Film]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDQX3jk5xxc [accessed 18 Jul 2021].

  • FREDERICK, Matthew. 2007. 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School. 56448th edition. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press.

  • GDC. 2016a. FTL Postmortem: Designing Without a Pitch [Film]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4Um97AUqp [accessed 15 Aug 2021].

  • GDC. 2016b. How to Make an Original F2P Game [Film]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vo_RsZrRZT0 [accessed 15 Aug 2021].

  • LOBB, Iain. 2021. ‘Level Design Principles and Techniques’. M. BORG et al. 2020. ‘Video Game Development in a Rush: A Survey of the Global Game Jam Participants’. IEEE Transactions on Games 12(3), 246–59.

  • NOCLIP. 2019. The Design of FTL & Into The Breach [Film]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BT-qkoaeGrw [accessed 15 Aug 2021].

  • NOCLIP. 2020. Dwarf Fortress Creator Explains its Complexity & Origins [Film]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAhHkJQ3KgY&t=189s [accessed 15 Aug 2021].