What’s New?
- We changed camera selection from using bumpers to using D-pad. Previously, camera op players had little control of which camera they could switch to. Additionally, we tried to make it more clear for the camera op which camera they were controlling by enlarging the camera selector.
- Security cameras have now been decoupled from the opposing team.
- We included post-processing on the attendee’s camera and added a vignette to the camera op’s screen.
- The attendee’s screen now has a compass.
- We incorporated sounds into key mechanics of the game like door sliding and tablet hacking. Additionally, the game now has a main background track that plays throughout the whole game.
- We enhanced the house environment by adding new features to different rooms including lighting, more furniture, and varied floor material.
What’s the Motivation?
Although our last iteration was a significant improvement from past iterations, there was still a lot of things that we could improve on based on our play-testing feedback.
Many of our camera op play testers were frustrated with the camera switching. As a result, we prioritized the camera op experience and added several improvements. The most significant improvement was providing the camera op a more intuitive way to switch cameras by using the D-pad where they could use 4 different directions to indicate which camera they wanted to switch to.
There has been a new change to our camera managers which prevents teams from gaining control of the same camera. Previously, if a team were to switch to a camera that the other team was using, they would gain control and pan the camera for both teams. This caused confusion among play-testers and thus we changed our camera system so that each team controls their own cameras and teams do not see the opponent’s cameras.
In our alpha build, we did not put too much focus on the setting of the environment. This release we are beginning to incorporate the setting. We made the scene darker and added a lot of smaller point lights to the scene, giving a dusk feel as well as giving more details to the house. Sound was added to increase immersion. There are a few sound effects for events such as doors opening/closing and tablets being hacked. There is now a main track that loops in the background.
The overall focus of this week was on bug fixes. There were a lot of issues breaking the flow of the game such as broken doors that would lock the progress of the game and would require a restart. The major game-play bugs have been fixed and we have been working on fixing other minor issues as well such as buggy capture by the security guard.
What’s Next?
- The art style lacks some uniformity especially between the environment, NPCs and our UI. In our next iteration, we plan to make the art style more cohesive.
- As we work on our game trailer this week, we hope to add some of the trailer into the game to introduce players to their goal.
