Hassan - Final Blog

Movement Issues

It seemed that people liked the movement, and I sorta do too. It was a mix between ds-like grid movement and keyboard movement--it fit the whole pc "Pokemon" game vibe.  The only oddity that people noticed were that colliders of some objects were bigger than they should have been. But that was because we used Unity's 2d Grid, which makes all tile colliders into squares--we could have manually created the colliders for some of the more nuanced tiles, but that that would have taken too long.

There was one playtest where the player thought that the closet was the exit to the starting room. In normal Pokemon, usually the mom walks through the door, so you can see where the exit is. If we had more time, we would've had some sort of animation or particle effect telling you where to go. 

We expected there to be an issue where the players thought that our cliffs/ledges were paths, since they looked alike. But we realized that the players recognized it as a cliff after they had collided with it once--which was a bit relieving because I couldn't really think of a good way to fix that issue as a whole.

Battling

There were too many battle encounters, it seemed that people sort of just wanted to rush through them by spamming. I would have liked to add more depth to the battling system, but we didn't have enough time. 

The difficulty also seemed to vary a lot. The older testers couldn't figure out what the moves did, while the younger testers had the game down to a science. I had this issue with my last level as well,  I don't really know which side to optimize for--because if I choose the testers that are worse at the game, it gets boring for those who are better, but if I choose those who are better, it gets rough for those who are worse. Maybe the best choice is to choose one side and commit fully to them, so I can make one side really happy, rather than make everyone feel sorta okay.

Collecting Scuffedemon

It seemed that no one had trouble finding and collecting all of the Scuffedemon, which was surprising. They went to the gym, saw they couldn't enter it, then went off and collected the pieces scattered throughout the map. It seemed that people had more difficulty with the amount of battles there were than with getting to the gym itself. 

Sound

It seemed that there was some variance in how loud people perceived the audio, we didn't really get a good answer on whether to turn it up or down. The solution to that is adding a functioning volume slider, to let people adjust audio as they please; we have an audio slider, it just isn't functional. 

Atmosphere

I think people liked the atmosphere and aesthetic as a whole. Some people found it comforting, some people found it eerie--I personally found it comforting. While we weren't personally going for it, the aesthic gave off a "quiet" and "solemn" vibe. To me, the big deal wasn't what the people perceived it, but rather that they perceived it consistently and strongly.

Bugs/Glitches

The biggest glitch by far is with our battling system, you can choose to cast a move before the enemy has casted theres--which doesn't do anything, but it confused people into thinking that it did. 

There wasn't a clear "game over" screen for when your team died. Instead, you would go into a battle and get soft-locked. 

There was also a "bug" someone noted where if you got sent to a new "scene" your character still kept moving, whereas in the normal games, it would stop the input.