Alpha Devblog (11/20/2023):
This week we really focused on revamping our tutorial to match our theming, polishing up our glass jar level, and ensuring a good player experience. This came in multiple forms including tweaked mechanics, changing camera interactions, adding more scenery and materials around the level, and more. Our tweaked mechanics include smoothing out how the pulley platforms work, fixing our air vents, and changing the respawn our fire particles’ hotboxes and how they interact with the players such as adding i-frames. We also adjusted every puzzle in our glass jar to encourage and require player cooperation, as well as improve how the camera interacts with walls and tight spaces.

Most of these changes were in response to feedback from our last playtest that largely said our ideas and level were good conceptually, but it was too buggy and didn’t allow the player to really enjoy the game itself. We had a large focus on bug fixes this week for this reason and think that all of our puzzles and mechanics have been cleaned up and improved. We are hoping that this level has few bugs left after this week and hope to spend most of our time in the next iteration making our second and final full level which will take place in a pond. We already have ideas for this water focused level and have begun initial implementations with all our previous bugs and fixes in mind so we can hope to avoid many of the same mistakes.

Beta Devblog (12/04/2023):
This week we focused on polishing up our game, making it more professional, and adding a bit more content. In terms of polishing, we have been cleaning up previous levels, making our models look a bit better, and making sure our player mechanics work as seamlessly as possible. These changes were made to ensure that our game isn’t tarnished by small visual glitches or player interacts that ruin some of the puzzles. For professionalism, we have added a themed title screen and nice fade-in and fade-out scene transitions. These additions make our game feel much more like other indie games, specifically the scene transitions. In terms of content, we have been working on new puzzles for our jar level in order to make the game a bit longer and flesh out the mechanics. We also modified the grass that was causing lag before due to the sheer volume of models to now be larger (better fitting with our theming of small characters in a big world) and use significantly less assets. The last major change was music that we added to every scene in our game. We’ve added two new music tracks to our game, one for the title screen and one for the gameplay.

This sprint covered most of the final big changes we wanted to make for our game this semester, so in the next iteration, we’ll likely be fixing/responding to player feedback we get in the next few days.

Windows and Mac builds can be found here https://www.indiedb.com/groups/unity-devs/downloads/drawn-together