Down To One
Now that we've decided to move forward with Change Please as our only concept, this week was about getting a better prototype ready for QA. My job was putting together all of the pieces that I had made originally with the puzzle system that Connor constructed. Fortunately now, I was able to get into our repository since we converted to a GIT repository. Personally, I'm much more familiar with GIT than I am with hg, so I don't expect too many problems in the future.
By the time QA rolled around, I had constructed a completely new level with a new type of puzzle. The premise is that the level is set inside an arcade cabinet, and the puzzle features different movable screens on different platforms with a spaceship at the bottom. The goal for the player is to line up all the screens so that the spaceship can fire a laser across all of them. For now, the puzzle just looks like moving blocks around and pushing a button, but it functions in the same way. The level has two of these puzzles with different colored blocks in each. The colors are used as indicators for which coin can move them.
QA Feedback
Unfortunately, QA feedback was a bit more mixed this time, but I think most of the negativity stemmed from the bugs that the game had. Specifically, we had an issue with moving the middle block in the puzzle, and how you couldn't move it when you should be able. To be honest though, myself and Connor couldn't figure out what caused the issue, so it looks like we're going to have to bring the prototype back to QA and specifically test for the bug.
One of the big things that I wanted to test was how difficult the level and the puzzles actually were. Overall, it seemed like it was pretty easy, but since this was more of an introductory level to the game, that was kind of the goal. Obviously for future iterations, I'm gonna need to bump up the difficulty so the game can be more fun.
Some non-gameplay things that we decided to test was what people thought of the game's name and some new art concept that Julia had started working on. Change Please was still the most popular out of the names that we brought, but we also want to test the names that people recommended during the testing session. As for the art concept, one of them was much more popular than the rest, so it's more than likely that that's the one we'll go with.
Sprint Takeaways
The big thing about this sprint for me was that I think I need to avoid going back to documentation too much. I made tasks for updating the documentation this week, but one of them had to be rejected since I thought there wasn't much that needed to be changed. This was a bit the opposite of what the rest of the team thought for the next sprint, so I think I'll still look at the documents for now, but not make as many updates in the future.
Next Sprint
It sounds like the rest of the team is going to be focusing more on documents this sprint, like I said before. I'll probably wind up doing some small touch-ups, but nothing big enough to make new tasks for. I want to focus on getting the new level to play even better by adding some new obstacles and implementing some of the systems that Connor builds. In addition, I'm hoping to get a menu screen at the beginning of the prototype, along with some instructions so the game can be better explained at QA. With the tasks I have right now, this week looks to be a bit heavier on work, but I'm pretty confident that the game will come better than the last iteration.