Weekly Dev Log #6 - Alpha

Summary

This week we had our alpha build. As the time between the last milestone (first playtest) and the alpha milestone was less than one week, we focused on the arm controls and the ui.

Addressed Feedback

Arm Control Complexity - The complexity of arm controls was reduced with less rotation controls given to the player and the introduction of auto-aiming for the distance of the grapple arm launch. This auto aim is present on all interactable objects (such as the spaghetti plate and the bag to drop the spaghetti in) and causes the hand to launch to that distance if aimed at. This way, players did not need to control exactly how far to launch the arm to if they were already looking at an object of interest.

Arm Launch Aiming - We've added aiming of the grapple arm launches to the head via a center reticle in the eye screen. This reticle is fixed in the center of the eye screen and lights up when hovering over an interactable object that has a grapple arm launch target. The launch itself stays fixed once launched and is toggled so once the arm is launched or launching, the eye can freely move without  affecting the aiming of the extended arm.

Terminal Load Distribution - We decided to move the grapple arm launch control back to the arm terminals given we've added the arm launch  aiming to the eye screen. This is a little more intuitive for player control and helps to balance back the load between terminals by giving aiming to the eyes in exchange for launching.

UI Tuning - Made some parts of the UI colors more clear and fixed some UI bugs including a dialogue bug that glitched the dialogue when multiple dialogue events were initiated at once.

Player Sensitivity - We've tuned some of the player control sensitivities and added a pause menu that allows players to modify their sensitivities  in game as well as return to the level select or quit the game.

Player Navigation - We've updated the player navigation by visually segmenting the left and right arm colors and removed the minimap. Based on player feedback from playtesting, the minimap wasn't needed and people didn't use it to navigate so we removed it and focused more on in-ship visual navigation.

Unaddressed Feedback

Camera Layout - We're continuing to stick with the 4 equal camera layout for now in order to focus on the gameplay changes but we're making sure to do our new UI elements in a responsive format to ensure changing camera layout isn't a huge undertaking. We want to focus more on the gameplay as camera layout isn't a huge concern on larger screens which we could have for our showcases.

Character Select - the character select is still a little unclear as to who is who, especially if an input is lost.

There isn't a lot of impetus for the player to do things - Level tasks could use more integration into the theming/characters or some other pushing pressure to give the players more reason to do the tasks or make not doing them more of a concern in order to motivate the players to do the tasks.

Additional Changes

Some of the models are disabled in this alpha build due to memory leaks while we address them (notably the spaghetti bite). Additionally, the evidence task and grapple arm breaking feature has been disabled for this build. We disabled the evidence as we are experimenting with new tasks and the evidence models are contributing to the memory leak. We disabled the arm breaking feature as we discovered in playtests that players are breaking the arm too often and we need to re-do the arm breaking to be more obvious and more adaptive.