Sean Gibson's ePortfolio

  This sprint has been quite an eventful one! To start off, I revamped the pole-vaulting mechanics for this sprint’s playtest! I started by creating a new enumerator that would allow me to create different “stages” of the pole vault. The first of these states is the “Ready” state that the player begins in. In this state, you can see a red line trace that shows where your pole is going to be planted. In the previous version, this was only visible when the player held down left click. Now, by pressing left click, the player “plants” their pole and enters the next state. Pole Vault Ready State Next is the “Planted” state. In this state, the player’s pole is anchored to wherever the line trace connected to when they entered the state. If the player moves too far away from the anchor point, they go back into the Ready state. But as the player moves closer to the anchor point, they move more slowly. This is to simulate the resistance of the pole “flexing” as the player moves closer...

  Sprint 3 of Thunder Vault’s development has ended! This sprint has been a pretty exciting one, with our first digital playtest, some good feedback, and a lot of big changes to come! Starting with the playtest, we had the player set up in a simple level with some obstacles to vault over and walls to bounce off of. I wanted to give the player some kind of goal, so I made an enticing tower in the middle of the level that required 4 increasingly hard jumps to ascend. This proved pretty effective! All of the playtesters that I watched tried multiple times to climb the tower, although I think I was the only one who was able to reach the top sadly. This indicated to me that while the mechanics felt comfortable to me, they were not nearly as intuitive for our playtesters. We also lacked any kind of tutorial or how to play section, meaning we had to explain the controls to our testers verbally. I would like to somehow design our next level in a way that encourages the player to explor...