During this iteration of our project, most of our team was dedicated to improving professionalism throughout the game. During play-testing, we found that while many players found our game’s theming to be intriguing and the concept fun in theory, the guidance and controls were often taking away from the experience as the ribbon (ability) system was unintuitive to a new player, and certain elements of our design felt out of place or hacky (think pixel stretching). To remedy this, we took actions such as creating a final sprite sheet, designing levels that are intended for a full gaming experience rather than a “feature test”, implementing an efficient save process, and finalizing the feeling of the controls in our unique “ribbon” system that we use for power scaling.
As our project is leaving the “get everything working” stage, we’re glad to see our development improve in quality. With the foundational elements out of the way, we now have the capacity to spend more time getting the game feeling right, rather than just functioning correctly. In the coming week, we hope to fully solidify our ribbon system with the addition of a 4th ribbon, and complete our world-map with interesting puzzle and platforming elements around every corner. We are also in the works with a narrative we hope to bring to fruition within the week. To do so, we are improving our current dialogue system with a complete rewrite integrated with the save system.