Summary

This week, the team was focused on polishing our tutorial level, fixing bugs/glitches, and polishing the pet abilities before presenting our game at the Ubisoft playtest. 

Timeline

1. March 6: Had a playtest with the University of Toronto's Computer Science First-Year Learning Community. We received a lot of helpful feedback and noted down bugs to fix before building our Alpha for Ubisoft.

Progress

• Tutorial Level: Polished tutorial level based on feedback and knowledge from CSC404 lectures
  • Includes lighted pathways for the pet to follow
  • Includes more obvious arrows pointing to tasks
  • Attempt to make instructions more visible (i.e., making them bounce)
  • Started working on a GIF for teaching players how to split
• UI
  • Created a splash screen
  • Conducted UX testing for UI layout 
• Living room
  • Set up more grabbable/climbable objects and tasks
• Pet abilities
  • Polished the dog grabbing mechanic and cat climbing mechanic 
  • Replaced the dog "stand on hind legs" mechanic with a dog "dash" mechanic
  • Added animation for the cat climbing
  • Started a particle effect for the dog dash
  • Fixed rigging bugs 
  • Started adding an indication to players for when the pet is switching halves (i.e. the pet will shrink, and then it switches halves)

• Camera
  • Added camera panning 

• Added respawn ability to prevent pet from falling out of the world and needing to restart the game
• Audio
  • Worked on SFX such as dog whining noise, task completed noise, dog walking noise 

Challenges

• Bugs found:
  • Pet can get stuck in walls 
  • Pet rotates / moves in the attic level when players are not controlling it
  • Some objects in attic fall over (when they're not supposed to)

• Making the UI and tutorial more obvious to players took lots of trial and error 

Next Steps 

• SFX from audio team for abilities such as switching, jumping, dashing

• Update to-do list UI
• Finish task design for living room
• Consider adding enemies (Roomba enemy in discussion)
• Work on cat/dog textures