Devlog #10 - Play, Test, Cry.

Hello again. Another week, another devlog, another grey hair in Evan's head. On Monday we had a play-test session with a bunch of the other fantastic projects, which by the way can be found here. This was one of our minor milestones of the project as it was going to be the first time that people outside of the development team got their hands on our build. Hang and the code gremlin spent a very intense weekend getting in some last minute features to showcase for us. 

The first thing that was done was we wrote the basics of our AI enemies. We created the background state machine and behaviour state classes for the enemies to work, and then implemented some basic states. We wanted to get some movement in for the play-test so we got our Idle and Walking states in place. The enemies work off of a NavMesh and Evan wrote some code for generating points on the mesh and keeping the AI inside of the rooms they are assigned to which works really well. He also wrote some code for them to allow path following, so we could have some enemies patrolling areas, instead of wandering aimlessly. The enemies also got a Hit and Death state, so when players were trying out the build they could do damage and try out some of our more offensive abilities.

Also, we now have arms! Yes, Hang spent a lot of time working on the arms over the weekend, getting the base models and animations in for us to use. These worked fantastic, and have been  updated to have some new animations for the use of abilities. We will keep those a secret for another little bit ;)

All in all the play-test session went really well for us! There seemed to be a great response to the game and those who played it said they liked it. As with all play-test sessions, comes bugs, and plenty of them. We managed to fix a few of them on the fly but Evan is looking deeper into some of them now. But what we got more than bugs, was suggestions on things we could add or improve on, which is what we were looking for the most. We had some fantastic ideas of what to do with puzzles, controls, UI, abilities and more, which we have nicely formatted into an excel sheet.

We really enjoyed a lot of the quality of life suggestions that users had and are focusing on those mainly at the moment. There were a good few about how the abilities felt and how changing them could be easier, so considering the abilities are our core mechanic, we will be working on testing some of those ideas first. 

As always make sure to follow us here on itch.io for your weekly devlogs and maybe a few cheeky test releases, and follow us on Twitter for some more regular updates from the team!

cám ơn and thank you,

Round Table Studios.