Devlog 6 - Testing

Goal

The main goal this week was to get the game into a final complete product, and I somehow managed to do that! The secondary goal was taking feedback and implementing it, to which I got quite a lot of feedback the last two weeks, especially in this final week.

Feedback

The main part of this devlog. I received a decent amount of feedback during my testing phase. The game wasn't challenging enough, and simply wasn't all that fun, on account to the 3 enemies in the game at the time. The following is a list of bugs and feedback that was found/given during the testing phase. Most of these were implemented, though some ended up resulting in the original idea being changes or scapped. The ones strikedout out resulted in the latter.

Bugs

• Enemies still experience knockback
• Enemies spawning in collisions is a problem 
• Vertical fence looks different every 2nd post on the right side of the river, the left it looks fine
• Some issues with UI when not in fullscreen (not sure if you can fix that other than making the border larger) 
• NPC interaction only works with one NPC at a time. This causes the following when 2+ are present in a scene
• NPC interaction has a glitch where if you reopen it it will close immediately after the first line.
• NPC interaction has a glitch where it appears to skip a convo line, this seems to be caused by the double line at the start.
• NPC interaction has a glitch causing it so there is only a max of 4 lines
• NPC interaction has a glitch causing it so only one NPC has a conversation going at a time.
• Clicking on the settings button shoots fireball
• Some textures appear to have compression turned on (hard to tell what's intentional)
• Water tiles block fireballs
• Trees collision is deceiving
• Doesn't freeze time when in conversation with an NPC
• Enemies and NPCs don't have collisions with each other
• Settings scene button crashes the game. (Removed from game)
• Enemies don't collide with each other.
• The UI moves based on screen size, need to make consistent (not noticeable in Unity, but on browser)
  
• UI isn't consistent, this is cause I was testing it in one scene and forgot to update the other scene.

Feedback

• Make it so that the "Press E to Interact" is always above the NPC head, not in middle of screen
• Animate characters
• Pause Menu that lets you return to menu.
  
• Music starts late, perhaps load it on the main menu and fade it in, or load it and wait for the player to start before playing it
• Enemies that shoot projectiles
• Player regenerates very quickly (Nerfed Regen from 5/s to 1.667/s)
• Enemies feel like they take too many hits to kill. TTK needs improvement (Buffed Damage from 10 to 17)
• Settings icon appears blurry?
• Players collider seems a touch to big, have to squeeze through the gaps
• Fireballs are big, and look odd just sliding across the frame
• Add check for fireball if it has a clicked on a UI item.
• Enemy Damage switch from collision enter to collision stay.
• SceneSwitcher unfreezes when clicking on Venture Forth, casting a spell
• Player looks a bit odd without a shadow, since (nearly) everything else has on

Testing Reflection

I did a pretty terrible job setting up my form to fill in, ending up in my receiving less information. As for the rest, I believe I did well answering questions and explaining what I specifically wanted to be tested, the current known problems, etc.

Polish and Final additions

I spent a lot of time messing around with the main scene map, trying to make it look nice as well as have it push the player into the "somewhat" right direction. Adding in sound was fun, especially having it continue across each scene.

Challenges

Setting up the boss fight was pretty hard, especially with working out how I was gonna do the conversation both prior and after the fight. I settled on using 3 scenes, with modified scene switchers, where one worked based on NPC interaction and the other on the death of the boss. Getting this to work was somewhat difficult.

The NPC interactions as a whole have been very irritating. The amount of bugs around it, especially when you had a second instance of it in a scene (due to a second NPC) meant it refused to work. NPCs are meant to be an important feature of my game, guiding players on where they need to go and originally allow for the upgrading of health, mana, and damage.

The scope of it all. Whilst I did eventually get it finished, I think my ideas were a little too grand even after adjusting it from the original concept, at least by a week. If I had to guess, my original concept might've been more in scope with 12 weeks, while my current one was more for 7 weeks, it didn't help that I lost a week due to mental health issues, causing me to effectively crunch this week (roughly 50 hours) to get everything done. Nonetheless, I am proud of what I have managed to accomplish.