Week 5 – Continuing work on gravity ability

For this week, I continued to work on the gravity ability. I worked on making a UI for the ability selection screen, I made a rough working version of the gravity ability and I had my first playtesting session for the game.

Meetings

I was sick at this time so I wasn’t able to go into university as usual to meetup with my team, although I did let them know of this.

As an alternative to showing my team members what I had done for that week, I instead sent them a video of my recent progress. Last week, I was mainly working on the SelectionArea Object, what the player would use to select objects to use with their ability powers.

We would, however, meet up on Discord the following day.

Playtesting

This was the week when the team would have our first playtesting session for the game.

Playtesting Demo

Here is the game as demonstrated for the playtesting session.

This is what it did:

1. It displayed a UI element which allowed the player to select the ability they were about to use by moving the slider to the left or to the right.
2. Once the player selected their ability, they would use the scroll wheel to select the size of the selection area (what objects would be affected by the players ability) and the strength (how far would the objects go), and these were tied together at the time so the player would be increasing both the amount of objects affected and the strength of the effect.
3. Finally, the player would cast the ability. In this instance, the player would cause the affected objects to have their gravity disabled and to have them float up into the air.

Guy wrote down feedback for the game and sent it to the Discord server:

Communication Difficulties

This project hasn’t been without it’s difficulties, particularly when it comes to communication with other teammates. One of the issues I’d struggled with during this phase of development was receiving feedback from Guy, as I often didn’t understand what he was saying to me, and I also felt pressured from him at some points.

To remedy this, I met up with Guy and Sophie, one of the teachers, for a group meeting on Friday to discuss strategies to remedy this. What we had agreed to during this session what that Guy would write down what I needed to do in a to-do list format, and then I would go and expand on those tasks. I found this to be beneficial in understanding what I had to do and what was expected of me from the team, as this was another area I had struggled in for this project.