In this week, I updated the jump sprite to include the protagonist's sword and shield.
I started to colour the logo with typical colours, gold for the text and green for the leaves.
Although this doesn't look bad per se, the team decided that it didn't fit the bright and vibrant style of our game, so I made some further iterations with the protagonist's colour scheme.
We all agreed that the last one was our favourite, and so this became our logo; we subsequently updated our Twitter page with a new header and new icon from the banner illustration I had created a few weeks earlier.
We also continued to playtest the game, with the reduced pulse and increased icon size resulting in less negative feedback; however, some people did feel the icon size needed to be further increased.
I also created new popup text for God Mode's activation; in this mode, instead of displaying 'OK' or 'Perfect', the game will display 'Godly!' for any hit. I created a glowing, rainbowy 'Godly!' text popup, with glitter in different places so it could be randomised to display different glitter each hit.
I also isolated the sword so that it could fall during the death sprite.
I also created a spotlight effect for the game; this functioned as a line that the player could use to read the attacks more effectively. We went through a few iterations of spotlights before we found one that we liked, which was the last vertical one with the two layers of light; this meant that the players could read it so that they could hit an enemy when the icon above their head hit the middle of the spotlight, but the outer edges could highlight the protagonist. A bloom effect will be added to this in Unreal later.
I also continued beatmapping later in this week. The blueprint had been revamped to be more efficient, but the nodes still functioned the same.
Although it appears far more complicated, it is a lot more efficient than the old format as it doesn't require Unreal to sequentially check each bar. I began to fill the blueprint in with the beatmap.
We noticed some unusual bugs in a certain segment of the later bars (the bars that are offset in the large image of the blueprint) in which if both beats 3 and 4 were filled out in the beatmap, the two beats would combine on beat 3. I modified my beatmap to accommodate for this while we figured out the source of the issue. Once the beatmap was completed, we did a lot of playtesting with people in St Andrews Building; we received some really valuable feedback from them.
Feedback Main Points
PROS
- Aesthetic and music is great
-Game feels very responsive
-Fun
-Difficulty of stage increases steadily
CONS
-Stage itself might be too hard for a first stage*
-Controls are not explained*
-Sprites are too small
-Background and screen pulsing are distracting
The feedback with the asterisks next to them are those which will not be so relevant when the tutorial level is in the game, as we only playtested the Campaign mode here.
As a response to this, we removed the screen pulse before God Mode and toned down the background further.
I also started working on a main logo for the game. The fonts used in the initial mockups were Diogenes and Xtra Regular, two free fonts which were used as the inspiration for a lot of our UI text, but the logo, like the other UI, would be hand-pixelled rather than an existing font.
I started off by creating some simple mockups and showing them to the team to get their opinions.
After the team suggested that they liked the first one for the composition of text, but also the disc element, and the repeat signs on the bottom logo, I made some more complex examples.
After showing these ones to the team, everyone agreed that the last logo in this set was the favourite, and I began to hand-pixel it.
I also created new popup text for God Mode's activation; in this mode, instead of displaying 'OK' or 'Perfect', the game will display 'Godly!' for any hit. I created a glowing, rainbowy 'Godly!' text popup, with glitter in different places so it could be randomised to display different glitter each hit.
