The Devlog on Making "Even Finer Things" Post Mortem - Part 2

Ok, where were we? We had just finished up Saturday's work, had a working prototype of a level, some hand 'drifting' and passed it to our game testers(family and friends). If you haven't read Part 1 Here, check this out first!

Sunday

Start the Day off with a call with Franchium to connect on design, play and future tasks for the day, and then get down to building.

Firstly, lets change the background colour to match a countertop, and the containers for the food to sit in.

Looking spiffy if I do say so. 

Next is some feedback from the users where we add that if a hand collides into another hand, it will drop the food.

Super easy to do, I make another larger collision around the arms, so when the collision enters each other, I release the hand. Put in a separate little modifier for velocity when they connect and I cause them to bounce ever so slightly.

It's time to make the start menu. Franchium and I both take cracks at it, and their mock up is sooooo good. I will be taking the fonts and colour scheme they are using, and we will be using this with some minor alterations for our storefront.

But being a simple person I am, I liked what I did in the first iteration, and that is to allow users to play around with the controls before they even get in the game.

Power through and make the level select and the level UI+score page and include a leaderboard.

I push through and add the music that Franchium found/soundscapes, and recorded a bunch of sfx and added them in.
and so hits the 9pm. A Level has been made, start to finish, and it's looking good. It's time to call it quits though because I have work tomorrow, and I won't be able to sleep if I program after 9pm.

Monday

During my Lunch Break, I drop the new foods into inherited scenes and make new custom levels, and after work I make the menu unlock the levels based on the previous level's performance. I also add the food items to pick a random value between -360 to 360, so the food isn't identical all the time in the menu. This adds the affect of spinning the food when a player drops it from their hand.
Testers liked this bug, so the bug became a feature.

9pm comes around real quick, so there is only the early morning to really get this sorted...

Tuesday

Feedback yesterday was to be able to exit/restart, start the game paused(didn't have a pause function yet), and I wanted to add one more level with a plate that moved. One person advised they didn't know we wanted them to put it in the center of the plate, so Franchium quickly made a bullseye for our basket in level 1, and I felt we did a great job showing the player how to play the game vs walls of text.

It was tight, but the Exit and Restart button was really easy, just an HBoxContainer with 2x link buttons, but the start was a bit interesting. I was taking the OS clock time at the start and end, so now every time there was a pause, I would calculate the start and end time of the pause, and add it to the pool to subtract from the current timer. 

There must be a better solution, but it's just before work, and it's submitting today!

The plate moving was really easy, and I didn't make any intense logic, just some tweens, and once tween is done, do another tween. The only thing is I started putting food under the plate level, and that's when things got a bit messy. I wanted to avoid causing accidental bugs, because no one is going to be able to test my work, so any code I added always had to start with a "If level == 'Level4'", and it worked out fine. Food was on the plate and staying.

A bug came up in testing that it would pick the thing behind it, but that was something I was aware of on Friday. I knew I didn't have enough time to play around with perfect, so I got best approximation. Essentially, whatever food last entered the the hand would be the one picked up, which means you can pick up a lower level. I would have to include a bunch of checks to try and determine if the player wanted the lower item or not, but this worked well for me to 'snipe' and repair some of my stack.

Franchium tidied up the store page and we submitted!

So Final Thoughts on this whole process

1. The point requirement was toooooo high to unlock the next level. It hinders users from seeing the theme, next time I make a skill based game like this, I would reduce the score threshold to like ~5 points. I was fine if people never got past the first level because this was a skill based game, and you could see the scoreboard pluse we had already lowered the bar so much, but we should have done more based off of the comments.
2. I am really happy on how well we communicated the game mechanics through showing and not telling. We only have like 1-3 minutes for a player to play the game, so I expected players to maybe try playing our game 2-3 times.
3. Ultimately, I liked having time to polish the game up, but I feel I would need to take time off of work to do something like this proper... I don't know if I could do that at this point in time.
4. Watched GMTK live stream of the first playthrough of games... it was a bit too harsh for me. I know I will skim through the games he plays to see if ours gets in the mix, but I am almost hoping he doesn't because of some of the criticisms he was leveling to the teams... oof.