2013 - Feedback and Change!

For the past few months we have been in a game testing and feedback loop type development, we invited many people in to play test, the first round was in October and we took the feedback and revamped many aspects.

• we tuned it from a game-mode type model to a storyline model, now the different game modes are slowly unraveled within an ongoing story.

• The story is told via comic style pages, these are shown at the beginning of each stage, also the story is supported with the aid of Apple who pops into different levels to give helpful tips and advice.

• The UI is greatly improved to be more colorful, animated and now includes wondering enemies looking for our protagonists, this fits in with the story of the Meats n Cheese's in a uproar and hunt for rogue Fruits and Veg. 

• Loading screen, after creating a new logo, we followed some good feedback and I created a eye candy piece for the loading page, this has the added benefit of helping to set the stage and give players a sense of what the game is about.

•  We created more helpful tutorial levels, this has been a challenging aspect of our game development, due to the different dynamic's of this game, helping the player understand how the organic universe works seems to be a on going project, for instance Cherry can send a blast of shards from the ground she is standing on, but each material has its physical properties so wood will not blast through metal, conveying this has not been easy for us and we are open and trying to learn new ways to teach the players how to understand the way everything works.
• Better visual and sfx feedback, we vamped and added many subtle elements to increase feedback for the player, for instance now a correctly executed stomp jump on bouncy rubber gives a little sonic boom effect to let the player know they succeeded. many little effects like this were added and the extra polish seems to be getting noticed or not getting noticed which is what we wanted, i.e. less confusion and more just playing.