This week

This week, the focus of the development was on polishing the game based on the feedback from the Feedback Analysis document and further playtesting. After a long period of debate over the new title of the game, we decided to rebrand as "Road Work Ahead".

Art

Final assets were completed to accompany the game's menus, title screen, and tutorial button indicators, as well as final models to adjust the environment of the level:

A Christmas tree was added to add a wintry element to the game along with a snowy particle effect to sell the winter weather, especially as winter approaches.

Special button designs were added for the title screen to give visuals of road signs.

Another major update includes the creation of the game logo after the new name was decided.

In addition to the main menu assets, a new screen was added to show the controls of the game to the player.

Finally, a paused menu and game over menu were both designed to appear in the game upon player response, with their respective button designs.

Music

The final music assets were created, including SFX for UI elements, ambiance SFX, and final crashing sounds.

Dev

In preparation for the final presentation, the final adjustments were made to tackle all the feedback that was previously received:

• In response to the feedback from independent playtesting sessions and the beta presentation, UI that responds to enemy deaths to portray the wave progress was added to the project (bottom left corner).

• The final menus in the game were adjusted to integrate the art assets and polish the 2D visuals.
• For greater visibility, the enemy and player cars were scaled up. Additionally, the colour of the path tracers were adjusted.
• Inventory power up icons that were delivered the previous week were integrated into the UI (bottom right corner).
• Adjustments to the controls screen was updated to account for the additional buttons used for the new features.
• In order to give the player a clear indication of when they have entered the intersection and can select the direction of the redirect, the highlight of the intersection will change color for better in-game response to player actions.
• Small delays were added to the game to give the player enough time to see the entire path of the enemies before they begin to spawn. Furthermore, the player and streetcar movement will be disabled when the wave pop-up appears to avoid frustrating player deaths when the UI blocks the screen.
• The start and end goal had a minor update to remove unsightly text and update their in-game visuals for better representation to the player.
• Additional visuals were adjusted with the progression of the beta test to show the environment slowly turning to the darker color palette, until all the buildings have shifted to the 'evil' buildings by the end for better game responsivity and immersion.
• For a greater game experience, the waves were redesigned to balance the difficulty and avoid unfair advantages, in which the game was discovered to "win itself" when enemy cars drove into each other and destroyed themselves. The speed of the enemies was capped to be lower to avoid circumstances in which the enemies are too quick for the player to catch up to.
• Bug fixes were tackled to fix issues with allowing player control when the pause and game over menu are displayed, issues that arose with the stacking of inventory power ups, strange fading behaviours of the UI inventory item indicator, misalignment of UI with the current game speed (fastforward), etc.

Features

To tackle the feedback received from playtesting and the beta presentation, important text on the controls were separated from the dialogue boxes within the tutorial to allow the player to skip through the lore or text if needed while still actively learning the controls. These controls are represented at the bottom of the screen with visual animations of the corresponding controller buttons to avoid heavy reading. Although the lore dialogue boxes of the game are still text heavy, this should suffice since this part will still be skippable and won't take away from the learning curve of the controls. Numerous bug fixes were accomplished to make the requirements to proceed through the tutorial more accurate to the player's actions, and new explanations were added to the tutorial to thoroughly explain wave progression, the inventory system, and the objective of the game.

Another feature was added in response to the beta presentation feedback to give the player three chances to touch the streetcar or enemy cars before death to make the game less punishing. Through playtesting, this has proved to be useful since playtesters were able to proceed beyond wave 2 after this update.

Obstacles/Challenges

In an attempt to address feedback for the unnatural creation of cycles for the enemies in which the testers thought the enemies should follow a type of hive knowledge, cycle detection was implemented into the project. However, this feature would vastly change the game experience and still needed polish, but there wasn't enough time before the final presentation to do thorough playtesting to understand the players' thoughts, so this feature was inevitably dropped.

What's Next

With the final presentation around the corner, major feedback will be gathered from this event and further playtesting to inform the development team of important features and adjustments to make before Level Up.