Week 9 (Nov 11 - 18)

This week, the developers worked to finalize the fundamental technical variables in the game, such as the camera movement and the controls. We learned from our playtests that the controls were too sensitive, leading players to get stuck in one of the four corners of the game world. Those have been addressed by lowering the mouse sensitivity. The camera was modified to more clearly indicate to the player when they were close to the game world's boundaries, which, as a byproduct, also fixed the bug of the camera clipping past the game world's walls.

Additionally, to avoid disorienting the player, we added a timer between each respawn of about 1.5 seconds, to ensure that the player has enough time to move their mouse to a more appropriate position. This provided an opportunity to make the UI during gameplay more minimalistic, and by moving the death counter into this respawn screen, and using a depleting meter for stamina, we were able to achieve this minimalism.

In preparation for the beta deliverable, the team will complete internal tasks relevant to development, art, and design and perform playtests five days before the beta code is due, giving the team enough time to make changes that the insights from the playtest suggest. We want to make sure that the playtests are not just being completed for the sake of inclusion with the GDD, but actually help influence and improve the game so that we may ensure that after the beta deliverable, the only thing left to do is polish, polish, polish.