Testing

With game testing over the goal was to implement as many changes as I could before the game was due. I will go over the feedback I received and then the changes I made.

Immediately I noticed with my first player that the health bar was not visible on some people's screens, and then I started receiving feedback on the scene switcher not working which was known but ended up becoming a priority to fix to make testing easier.

Here is an aggregate of tester feedback, this has also been uploaded in the documentation devlog.

This feedback along with watching playtesting was very beneficial, I immediately got to work on the scene switcher and after many hours of dealing with bugs the webgl builds would have got one to work. Then I worked on modifying the boss's behavior to skew the odds of it doing certain attacks and to add rules to prevent certain combinations. Most importantly I decided the boss should never use the wave attack immediately after spawning an enemy. The feedback received that this situation ended their runs as there were too many bullets to dodge.  While there are ways of dealing with this combination I do agree that it was too difficult for the game. Now the big spell attack which is pretty much a throw-away so the player can do some damage without risk replaces any time the boss would do a wave after the spawner spell. Then I did some camera adjustments and added all the sprites I had worked on that hadn't been implemented for the test build. The test build only had textures for the floor but a sprite sheet for the player had already been prepared. It was then recoloured for the enemies.

Then I re-adjusted the size of certain boss attacks to match the player and gave all the projectiles textures. I then added trails to make it immediately recognisable what direction a bullet was travelling at a glance when the game got more hectic as when I got more tired playing the game after work or at night it would get hard to track them all. I then worked on a healing item between the first fight and the boss after a tester requested it to make the game less punishing. I textured it and it was ready for implementation.

Then came the biggest struggle of the project, the boss's sprite. I won't go into too much detail as I talk about it more in the documentation page but I could not create a trebuchet and compromised to make the boss a wizard knight.

After a couple of days' break to work on other projects, I worked on some textures for buttons, something easy to get me back into the project.  Then I started on the games music, I went to BeepBox to a main theme and a boss theme. BeepBox is an online synthesiser written in JavaScript that allows the user to create "illustrations" of music. Different instrument noises can be imitated, or you can attempt to create entirely unique sounds but what it is useful for is making simple music creation accessible to the public. While I enjoy music and playing guitar I do not have an understanding of most music theory and this program makes it easy to write short tunes in the browser. Best of all you maintain ownership of anything you write and record/export. I also used the synths gunshot preset with some modification to make the noise for shooting/casting a spell. Once I had two songs written I made a wall texture on a separate smaller tilemap to go over the walls in the game. This is because the floor tilemap is made of very large interchangeable floor tiles that are thicker than the walls.

That was most of the changes this week, I spent a lot of my time addressing the feedback and adding effects and graphics to the game, then doing the documentation for the final submission.

Thank you for reading, Sam Geoghegan