Trash Pandas

So over the week I was working on implementation of animations. We now have more visuals than in the earlier weeks. However, I ran into an issue implementing the character animations, leading to the game breaking in it's first 10 seconds. I will continue to explore a different method to add them. And for the coming days I plan on working on the animations already in to make them feel better. As a well as sound implementation when files are available.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0H2xAutwl8Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0H2xAutwl8Y https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByIZ_gRtK0sJTGpoM3lTNnVzaU0/view?usp=sharing

We didn't have the systems in place to do good a/b testing for this week, but got some basic feedback that we're using to guide this week's semimajor overhaul. The consistent issues that have come up are a lacking sense of player control and insufficient feedback from the game. A key complaint regarding character control is the inability to move without jumping. We had considered that aspect of the controls something that differentiated our game's feel from similar competitive games, but will have to let it go if the quirkiness doesn't justify the accompanying imprecision. Testers had complaints about a lack of feedback in two areas: hitting the ball and scoring. Players had no idea how the character's body was divided into hitboxes or how the ball was meant to behave when hit in different ways. As it is now, no one playing the game could be expected to figure out there are three distinct areas of the body that affect the ball differently. Player were able to ...

Aside from meeting with the team and listening to what needs to be changed within the game itself I did not contribute as much as I should have. From today's class I took away that although we were ahead of the early on, we neglected some essential parts of the game. While I had noticed some issues I was hesitant in implementing changes due to contraints, however with today's takeaways, I learned it's better to get something working even if it's not complete to actually see whether it works or not. With the coming week I hope to get the gears going and start working more on having better control in the game.

Aside from participating in our group discussions about the direction of the game's hit boxes and art style, I didn't really contribute to the project this week, but I today's class has helped me to overcome an obstacle to more meaningful contribution.  Concerns about time limit, scope, and limiting inputs had given me the idea that we were beyond the point of any elaborate changes to our mechanics, and the relatively substantial amount of time I'd been spending on my other group project dissuaded me from challenging that assumption.  I know better now, and this week will be proactive either requesting implementation of ideas from Mitch or trying things out on my own. The challenge we have to take on now is finding ways to make the gameplay feel more intentional for the players. 

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1q1991rjg5dWzQvShiPuyFELiDqIzwvU6pghwg2PijvI/edit?usp=sharing