All at Once
Over the past few weeks, my focus has been equally on the controllers and the game UI. Some tasks have presented challenges that would require playtesting but for the most part the biggest challenge has been to unify everything.
The team has been working extremely hard towards the GDC submission for the ALT CTRL showcase and, of course, that means that the controllers needed to be a major focus. While I was responsible for the functionality of the controllers, others were tasked with the overall look of them and to make them look presentable for the submission video. I have made a list of tweaks to make to the rig and it will be my task over the break to implement them.
As for some game icons, I’ve been ‘struggling’ with the main directional arrows due to multiple views. Overall, once described to the player they were able to play the game just fine. These are some of the designs:
Players should be able to interpret them very quickly to then slap the heads in the correct direction. All of these designs were successful in relaying the message, so I decided to stick with the last design. While the pie sections were representational of the head and the area to make contact with it, the curved arrow was just as intuitive to read. It has a more animated look rather than the pie that didn’t really have that much interest, especially when our game runs on adrenaline. I still want to try out a pie with an arrow, but I’m not sure how that will turn out.
The colours of the icons were also changed from directionally representational colours to colours representing the player to whom the zombies belonged to. This made it easier for players to distinguish between their targets and their opponents.
Meanwhile, I’ve mostly been filling in with other small tasks and preparing some images for the game. As more art for other aspects continue to roll in, I’ve needed to rework some icons, so that will likely be my next task. This includes the HP and buddy bar at the top. They need to follow the style of the rest of the game assets like the characters and background images. I have some plans for this that will probably reflect my older designs.
I’ve also worked on a logo for the game to replace the old one. I can see now some issues with the readability of the text, but it was good enough for the submission. I tried to keep it fun, Disco-y, popping, and with some of the styles of the 70s/80s.
I mentioned that I wouldn’t mention the details of the controllers, but I changed my mind. So the rigs are being hit pretty hard and people are going all out with slapping them. This is a factor that I planned for but didn’t think players would do. They just tried to hit the things as hard as they could. The rigs are being held together by few connections and screws, all pointing in the same direction. This was the issue. The screws were being jostled around in the wood that it widened the holes and allowed for the wood pieces to fall apart from each other. While I want to keep the weight as light as possible I would also love to have metal or plastic pieces instead of wood.
Relating to the inputs on the controller, I will need to redesign their shape and the materials used to create them. Currently, each head has 3 pads, each with a top and bottom part with conductible connectors and felt to separate the contacts.
I based this off of the DDR mat designs. They are very successful in their design. They have the same contact to contact system with a thin holey spongey foam piece that separates them. I know now that I also would greatly benefit from sponge rather than felt because it allows for so much more compression and inflation that the felt fails to provide; it just flattens over time. This caused the contacts to touch when the player hadn’t even made contact with it.
The shape of the pads also presented an issue. They were so big that they overlapped with other pads and automatically connected even when players didn’t touch them. Players don’t even need that much surface area to slap; playtests showed that players mostly slapped in one area. These overly large rectangular pads will be recreated using plastic sheets, conductible tape, and thing sponge in the shape of a circle, this time. This will ensure that the contacts won’t automatically connect and the buttons won’t auto-push from pressure from other pads.
The team encountered one last, very strange issue with the design last second. It seems that the Makey Makey doesn’t accommodate all situations. With our design, when both players hold their disco balls and high five each other, starpower activates. It came to our attention that when one person was making contact with one end (not ground) they could automatically trigger it without closing the circuit and touching ground! Research showed that this has been a known issue with the system and that this presented a non-typical configuration of the controller. Sometimes people are just more grounded than others so they can complete the circuit all on their own. Unfortunately, we will need to change the design because of this. We really want to have players make physical contact so this will be a major challenge.
Overall, progress is moving smoothly. We have had this one period of focusing on polish and we will definitely have more, especially during the final 2 months. Now that the systems for the 2 game modes are implemented, we can focus on piecing together a full game, start to finish, and work on the level progression and challenge increase as well as different experiences for each level. During this time, I was reminded of the factors that make our game fun and the ways that people will want to interact with the controllers. We need to keep our sights on these very obvious elements to make the game the best.
