Through the playtests at Media Design School and Wellington Armageddon, we accumulated a long list of valuable feedback. We received affirmation that the mechanics we had developed were fun, but we knew we had a long way to of refining them to make them really feel good. The thing that almost all playtesters found the most fun was the grapple hook but even that needed lots of work to improve it. For the programmers, this week was all about taking the mechanics we currently have and refining and iterating on them.
For me, the primary refinement concerns were again the camera – which was felt by many players to have been clunky – and the guards – who had the IQ of a bag of hammers and sometimes became stuck while searching for the player. I needed to implement a camera hint system so that when the player first encounters the grappling hook, for example, the camera gently tilts up to show it. This is because it is very difficult to make players look up. I had implemented something similar to this while making the dialogue system which orientated the camera towards a particular target and zoomed in. I couldn’t just use that dialogue camera system though because that didn’t support automatically tilting the camera to face a higher or lower target; it could only swing the camera around horizontally. Additionally, a weight value needed to be applied to this system so that the camera didn’t move to focus the grapple point directly in the middle of the screen, but rather ‘pushed’ it towards the centre by a weight value. Also, it needed to not zoom. The horizontal camera movement was easy to implement. I encountered some difficulties with the vertical camera movement, however, as it initially seemed to immediately face downwards when trying to focus on the grapple. I eventually improved it but it still didn’t work in every situation. I will have to revisit it next week. I will also need to continue refining the camera’s autorotation to be smoother. I reworked the AI this week to be a little more competent. The guards can now shout at their nearby buddies for help if they are chasing the player. I also fixed a big which made guards get stuck during the search state when their alert time reached 0 and they should have been heading back to their patrol route. The guards were getting stuck because the detection level didn’t go down to 0, which is the trigger to switching to patrol state. I compared detection level to epsilon in this check instead. I also improved our AI pathing tool to select whether we want the guard to loop or ping-pong along his path points. I also reworked the exclamation marks from the prototype and made them work with our guard AI. This makes it very easy to see what the guard is doing how close the guard is to detect the player. When the guard is standing in place while trying to find the player, it is now much easier to understand that he is searching because we can now see the detection meter ticking down. I also wrote some code for getting the player’s delta angle rotation to use for Juane’s turning animations for the player.
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