Capstone Dev Blog 10 - Refining the new Gameplay Loop

This week had a heavy focus on finalizing the player experience through rounding out the final level, editing the key system and revising the intro to the game and the two end states. This sprint was ended a bit short for me, however, because I had gone to Montreal International Game Summit, which took up 3 days. As a result, some extra work will have to be added to the next week, such as more touch ups I was short on time to implement in the game intro and VDD reformatting and final iteration.

Key System

The key system is now fixed, and more importantly, is now displayed to the player as a HUD. When you pick up a key of a color, the image appears with the glow being relative to the key you picked up.

Level

First thing for level work was including the layout of the second floor and iterating on the first floor in documentation to create a specific flow for the player. I did this in Inkscape, and then brought it into a document to create a soft storyboard of the player experience.

"The player starts in a room with a glowing locked door (lock 1) and a lockless door. With nothing else in the room, the player has only the choice of going to the other room containing a key (key 1), glowing the same color as the lock."

Next, I blocked this out in unreal to make sure that the scale wasn’t wrong and that the flow made sense. After this, I added new cultist paths to each floor and created all the lock and keyspawners I needed before handing off the level to the artist to fill the environment with props.

Game Over!

Now when the player dies, the game ends a lot more smoothly, with a pause to the game and a new audio representing an unfortunate fate for the player. Fonts have also been added to keep the game’s mood more intact, even outside the gameplay.

Game Won!

Using a similar mood and feel of the game over screen, the game win screen now fades in and contains the same fonts.

Game Intro

The game’s intro now contains a new font and has been updated to have a shorter context. Not much is different here, and only one more iteration on the controls page is needed for this to be complete.

Final Thoughts

MIGS may have been a hamper in some of the transitional states of the game (game over, won and intro), but the polishing is proving to be good for the game overall. Next sprint will be a necessary additional layer of polishing paint, and I am excited to be showing our final game off to onlookers and faculty come next Monday.