In preparation for the playtest, our team needed to clearly outline our objectives to ensure that we gathered meaningful feedback. It was crucial to define a feasible scope that would allow us to accomplish our goals within the given timeframe, while also providing enough features for comprehensive evaluation.

Initially, our plan focused on integrating artwork and player movement with the procedural room generation system, aiming to test the fluidity of movement within the dungeons. This involved implementing a camera system that would lock onto each room as the player navigated.

As we progressed, we successfully achieved all our original goals for the playtest, which included artwork, animations, and a functional camera system. With our foundation set, I decided to advance the combat system, collaborating with our mechanics designer who worked on the player attack feature. In parallel, I focused on creating the first enemy, known as the Whispers. Upon completing the attack implementation, our mechanics designer pushed the updates to the repository, allowing me to integrate health and damage mechanics for both the player and the Whispers, thereby completing the combat system. Despite not having enough time to finish a second enemy, we made significant strides in our progress.

At the time of the playtest, we had successfully incorporated several key features into Lament, including a start menu, interactive buttons, a working camera that locked onto dungeon rooms and zoomed out for larger doors, scene transitions, and procedural room generation for randomized dungeons. Additionally, we had pixel artwork and animations for the player, who had functioning attack and dash abilities, as well as health management. The Whispers enemy was equipped with ranged projectiles and follow/run behaviors, along with its own health script, marking a notable advancement in our game development efforts.

However, we had made a lot of progress and this is what we had implemented into Lament at this point:

• Health script
• Start menu
• Working buttons
• Working camera system
• Locks onto rooms in the dungeon
• Zooms out at the large depression door
• Scene Transitions
• Procedural Room Generation
• Randomised dungeons
• Pixel artwork
• Envrionment obstacles (spikes)
• Working Player
• Pixel artwork + animations
• Attack
• Dash (with i-frames)
• Health script
• Whisper enemy
• Ranged projectiles
• Follow and run behaviour

The feedback form can be found here and our other observation notes can be found here.

---

The feedback from the playtest mostly just fed back into our own understanding of the game. Areas like a tutorial, whilst it would help, can’t really be properly completed until after we have figured out all of the gameplay mechanics that we will be including in the game.

New feedback, as seen in the feedback from I made, shows that the combat didn’t feel satisfying to the majority of players. With the hitboxes not ‘feeling’ correct when I interviewed people for more personalised feedback. To summerise, the animations and hitboxes didn’t feel like they lined up correctly, and the movement mechanics felt clunky.

Our plan for the future is to change how the dash works and fix the attacking animation/hitbox to look and feel more consitent. Along with this we want to iron out any bugs that have cropped up in the playtest, but E-jay, our lead programmer, feels like they will be very quick and easy to fix.

Our mechanics designer also updated our Trello board to keep track of what was going on in the project: