Week 3 - Playtests!

WEEK 3 - PLAYTESTING AND BOXES AND BOXES AND BOXES
The past two Wednesdays we've been setting up playtesting sessions with the class and testing each other's prototypes for feedback and advice. It was great to see the variety of games chosen and each person's approach on how they wanted their game to look and feel. We have everything from Driving games up to Investigation games, a broad spread.

PLAYTESTS:
Both our playtests went really well, with positive feedback on the driving controls, both old and new, however we're sticking with the arcade feel. Many people wanted some way to drift, so I'll try add a hand-break to rotate and slow the car when pressing "SPACE" or something.
The main issues were with the boxes falling out much too easily, causing the player to have to return and collect them, while MORE boxes fell out, so this is definitely a glaring issue that needs to be worked out. It's not fun to lose score by doing what you're seemingly meant to do naturally.

ITERATING PLAYTEST FEEDBACK:
I found that spawning the boxes in the back and trying to control them was a fun mechanic, but after 2 weeks of testing nearly, it's been quite difficult to find a balance of fun and annoyance with the boxes constantly falling out when you turn. This was a recurring issue in playtests, with people liking the collection and control aspect, but disliking how easy it was to lose boxes and therefore, score.

I'll try to fix this by adding a box collider as a "roof" which disables for a few seconds once you crash or hit a hazard, causing the crash and movement to lose you boxes from the back, opposed to losing them when you're doing normal things like turning, although it's easy to add a timer for how long you've turned for, which I might also do.

NARRATIVE:
We worked a bit more on the story for our game and why you're there in the first place. The narrative is that you're brand new to the job after the previous driver crashed out, and decided to chuck all the mail away while on the job, so, it's now your job to collect them.
Our setting will be a small section of the city. We want an urban setting but without having to model an entire city, so we're going to have sections cut off but make the world seem larger than it is. I tried to do this by making a skyline. I removed the background off an image of an existing skyline, creating 4 quads, and making a box around the level.



My teammate Dom has started working on a modular kit for building the level. We'll simply lay out sections from the kit and build roads/blocks of the city.