Summary

This week we completed our Beta build, marking our feature complete milestone. We've made significant changes that address the camera layout, added a tutorial, and updated UI across the board.

Addressed Feedback

Camera Layout - We've updated the camera layout to address the eye cam being one of the most important parts of the screen. Now the eye camera takes up more space with each individual player cameras  taking up less space with space for ui elements off the camera elements. This means the more important sections of the screen (the eye camera) takes up more space so is easier to see.

Character Select - We've updated the character select scene from a static 2d environment to a 3d environment where after joining players can rotate their plorp (character). In addition to the upgraded graphics, we did this to address players not being clear on which character they were playing as. Now that they have some control to rotate around, players should be able to associated their input the character of a specific color moving.

Unaddressed feedback

Pressure  - We've heard feedback about how to give the player a sense of pressure or impetus to do things. We've discussed a lot of different things like judgement from Nova, time pressure, and fail states but we decided to focus on other mechanics for the beta feature complete deadline.

Depth perception - We attempted to get a lit level scene for the beta build but when we tried it we were unable to get a satisfactory result. We were going for a lit level scene to address some depth perception issues that came with the unlit level scenes. We've previously observed that players had some trouble identifying how far away the hand was and we'd hoped the tutorial we added would give players enough knowledge about the launching mechanic that they won't default to trying to move the hand out towards targets manually. We still have some ideas of how to address this that we'll explore.

Additional Updates

Tutorial - We've added a tutorial, expanding on level 0, that gives the players a very simple progressive introduction to the 3 terminal areas (head, arms, legs) with a task to accompany that (putting a basketball in a hoop).

Updated Pause Menu - We've updated the pause menu graphics and slider settings to be smoother.  We've also updated the pause menu to actually pause the game so blinking and other events are not a concern while paused.

Ship interior updates - We've updated the ship interior to be lit (which helps provide a navigation hint in the tutorial) and added some flavor props to the ship.

Task based fire - We've added task based scripted fire to occur for the arm terminal areas which provides a break from the normal arm terminal gameplay during  certain tasks.

Interior of arms - We've removed the interior arm corridors and corresponding doors in the ship as we do not have enough time to polish and iterate on their design in the last two weeks so we've scrapped this feature.

Main Menu - Added a lovely main menu graphic.