Three weeks into development, Opus Pocus is now in a playable state. The majority of our first level has been laid out allowing us to place collectibles throughout and let users run free. Getting to this point gives us the opportunity to begin testing our game with people that have not seen it before and start analyzing the moment to moment gameplay. Last Friday we were able to have 18 fellow students test the differences between two camera systems and, upon playing both, they were asked to fill out a short survey covering some basic questions about the two systems. This session was extremely successful and the feedback will go a long way while we finalize our camera. The importance of heavy QA testing for our project is becoming more and more apparent.
In our current schedule, it is planned that we will do a substantial amount of testing at the end of every week on Fridays. This will allow us to perform large improvements and add content during the week to move on to testing quickly and thoroughly. Upon the implementation of our missions, it will become critical to ensure that the player is guided through the Level in an efficient manner and a high level of fresh eye testing will allow us to determine bottlenecks and problem areas. During these sessions it will be very important that our level designer is present and observing how players are moving through our world. It will also be critical that we gate players in the proper locations and at the correct times.
Watching players collect the orbs in our initial run through proved that the idea was easy to grasp and that the simple puzzles put forth were easy to solve. The majority of users were able to collect all of the orbs with virtually no effort and the ones that weren’t would have been able to had they been given more time to complete the task.
Our next goal is to have a complete scripted mission sequence for Level 1 by the end of the week in order to allow for another testing session on Friday. This will give us an accurate depiction of challenges that we will face when it comes to fluid level design. By ensuring that we provide enough guidance and direction to our players, an enjoyable gaming experience can be created for all to enjoy!
