Skip to main content

CAGD Blog Post 3 - Thunder Vault Kinesthetics Playtest!

  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 explore different possibilities and techniques with the pole vault.



I prepared a feedback form for the playtest as well, and I tried to keep it as short as possible so that testers wouldn’t get bored while answering questions and give less effort into their answers. Much of the feedback that we did get indicated that our movement mechanic didn’t quite feel accurate to pole vaulting.



While speaking with the testers, many of them said that the pole vault felt like it gave you too much horizontal distance and not enough vertical distance. I believe that may be because of the yellow arrow used to show the direction the player will travel upon releasing the pole vault. The arrow is quite long, but doesn’t really accurately represent the distance the player will travel in the air. I think that testers expected that the arrow would show the distance they would travel, but upon releasing the left mouse button, they didn’t go nearly as high as they expected.


Ultimately, despite these flaws all testers said that they would play again if the game included more content, which affirms my belief that our concept is a promising one! This playtest has given me new insight into our project, and motivation to refine it into something even better! Sadly, I haven’t been able to do much work on the project since the playtest, as I’ve been busy catching up on other homework, but I have plans for an overhaul of the pole vaulting mechanic.



I plan to keep having the player hold left click to plant their pole, but this time, as they move closer to the location of the pole, they will meet resistance to simulate the “flexing” of the pole. Next, upon jumping, that built up resistance will be transferred into vertical velocity, simulating the actual “vaulting” portion of pole vaulting. I believe that while this method may be slightly less fluid, this more accurate representation of pole vaulting will make the player feel more involved in their movement, and make it a much more immersive imitation of pole vaulting. I’m confident in my ability to program the physics of this mechanic, but a lot less sure of how I could animate a pole that can flex and bend in the way that I’ve drawn. I plan on getting the physics right first, and then seeing what I can do about the visuals with whatever time I have left. This sprint has given me a new burst of motivation that I can’t wait to act on, and I’m very excited to share what I’ve completed by the end of Sprint 4!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

CAGD 373 Blog Post 4

This sprint I was assigned a modular set to create the basic interior rooms out of, with three different textures for the walls. (a Square Brick Texture, a Cement Texture, and a Metal Wall Texture) The actual modeling itself was as basic as it gets, I just made a few different shapes and sizes of wall along with a doorframe, with a couple floors and ceilings to complete the set. The interesting stuff this week was the textures, all of which I made in designer! The brick texture was probably the most complicated, and the one I’m most proud of. Starting with a brick generator, I used some gaussian spots to add some variance to the shape of bricks (using the spots to “cut out” chunks of the perfectly square bricks) and that worked pretty well! After that, I used a grainy looking noise map to fill in the black part of this mask to add in the noisy texture of mortar between bricks Next, to add some color variation to the bricks, I used a flood fill node, which was able to identify all the...
Post a Comment
Read more

Idle WitchCraft Sprint 4

  This sprint, I started by implementing alternate success conditions for certain scenarios. This means that for some scenarios, there will be multiple different stat checks that can lead to different outcomes, and potentially different scenarios down the line. Two different outcomes of the scholar’s exam scenario. One for high intelligence, and one for high charm! This was an interesting programming challenge, as I had to figure out how to associate these alternate conditions with the data table that is currently holding all the scenario information. The interesting thing about these alternative outcomes is that they function as almost half a scenario. They have no intro dialogue, but they do have a unique stat check, outcome dialogue, and list of scenarios to unlock on success. Because of this, I decided that I would copy the current scenario into a new struct. That way, I could “swap out” certain pieces of data at runtime without having to fill my data table with duplicate inf...
Post a Comment
Read more

CAGD 373 Blog Post 5

  Judgement day nears! And sadly I don’t have too much to show for this week as finals in other classes have swallowed up most of my time. However with most of them finally out of the way I’m clear to focus all my time towards this project over these next couple of days! The real meat of my texturing work this week is this Exterior Trim Sheet. I tried to group together as many models with similar-ish materials as possible so that I could get textures applied efficiently. Here I’ve created a trim sheet consisting of metal, tree bark, wood, a beige stone texture that worked pretty well for the pipes, and a separate, rougher metal texture for the motors found just outside the facility doors. I spent a lot of time compiling a list of all the models in our project along with reference images, so that way I could organize them into texture sets based on similar materials/texturing needs This plan should help to really accelerate the texturing pipeline over the next couple of days, so t...
Post a Comment
Read more