Statement for Class

Notes for class:

A game set in space! is a single-player 2D action-adventure game in which players play as an astronaut exploring the dangers of space to find planets to deliver the vaccines. With the COVID-19 Vaccine rollout, we wanted to create a game that addresses the challenges of getting people vaccinated by highlighting the tropes surrounding vaccines from lack of accessibility to misinformation. Since we wanted this game to be part exploration and part storytelling, we created 3 planets with cutscenes to show how the player’s actions impacted others characters.  The players use WASD to control the ship’s direction, spacebar to stabilize their ship, mouse to aim, and left mouse button to fire projectiles. This game was made as a team where we all contributed to game design as well as taking on additional roles. Erna is our artist and sound designer; Liam is our programmer and physics designer; Finn is our programmer and narrative designer; and Rocco is our level designer and programmer. 

With the game taking place in space, an important part is programming the physics to simulate the feeling of low gravity in space. To do this, we created a Rigidbody Static and Dynamic in conjunction with GameMaker Studio 2’s physics engine to create the feel of gravity that we wanted for player movement and other objects. Since we want our game to provide a narrative experience, we created a Dialogue Manager where we could easily input characters who were speaking and their dialogue. This Dialogue Manager also allows players to select different dialogue choices. As for our art, we want to stray away from GameMaker’s pixel-art so we decide to go for a cartoon style with animations to make it look better. Since we only had less than 3 weeks to complete our game from start to finish, managing our 4-person team is important to make sure tasks are fairly distributed and well organized so we can work efficiently under time constraints. We followed a waterfall workflow so we structured tasks we needed to complete linearly starting with player control, physics, dialogue, and etc. This was easy since we progressed pretty quickly and at the same pace which led to a smaller chance of us working on parts of the game that might get cut out if we don’t get to finish them. To manage the project, we created a spreadsheet to track down what should be done by certain deadlines and a GitHub Trello board to assign team members with tasks they should work on. A hard part of our game development process was using GitHub to collaborate since we often faced technical issues that were out of our hands which led to us having to deal with many merge conflicts and instances where we couldn’t even open up the GameMaker file. But through our experience with Git, we have become more confident and organized making sure we weren’t working on the same files at the same time. 

During our beta playtest, we were able to get valuable feedback from our classmates with most of them revolving around player controls. Our player ship had controls where the left thruster would activate while pressing “A” which would move the player to the right so it was often hard to steer the ship since it was inverted. Therefore we decided to switch it so pressing “A” will activate the right thruster and steer the ship left. Furthermore, we added a stabilized mechanic that will stop the ship from moving so people can reset if they have to. Overall, we are proud of our work since it is the first time we’ve worked together and it turned out to be a successful game in which we were able to finish it within our original scope.

Playtesting

1. Mitu
   1. Reached planet accidentally
   2. Tried to use enter to select dialogue choice
      1. And tried to use 1 and 2 to select, and arrow keys/ws to move up and down in dialogue
   3. Accidentally went through the same dialogue in blue planet
   4. ‘Movement feels a bit fast’ - acceleration too fast?
   5. Initial a / d controls made more sense
   6. Instead of auto triggering a planet, press a key to trigger?
   7. Hard to right self after spinning out
   8. Tutorial zone to teach controls?
2. Noah
   1. Wanted to be able to break asteroids when colliding with them
   2. In dialogue, thought ‘you’ was talking about something else
   3. Dialogue 1 and 2 thing again
   4. Try and provide more direction to player
   5. Spaceship continues to be too unresponsive specifically turning
   6. Dialogue skip option?
   7. Render smoke below spaceship and maybe add a fire effect
   8. Put a content warning on this
3. Marcus
   1. Last dialogue can be quit out of early
   2. Wasn’t sure how to get out of a spin
   3. Need to make sure the fight world with the controls and physics of the game
   4. What if we have a key that you can hold that auto fires thrusters to stabilize spin?
4. Seth
   1. Planet is too close to spawn
   2. It wasn’t clear whether vaccines got to the guys on the planet (i think just cause the narrative isn't all in yet)
   3. Physics are nice
   4. Gravity well sometimes flings you REALLY fast
   5. Hard to control, but in a kind of ‘good, physics-sim-feeling way’
      1. Didn't feel like the controls’ fault when the ship went out of control
   6. Funny moment when asteroid knocked him out of the gravity well
   7. Felt like asteroids should damage him
5. Kitty

1. The game mechanic seems really fun, and I love the art.
2.  It is not very intuitive without instructions (I can see the hint that I have to reach three places but it would be much better if it's clearer) 
3. It feels so slow I'm so annoyed... I feel like I'm so stupid but maybe its my problem T-T 
4. Overall, I would be playing this game in my spare time! It's really fun and creative