November
Goals
1. Make Fishing More Intuitive
We are developing a fishing game!! Of course, the fishing has to make sense. We upgraded the fishing mechanic significantly by using mouse controls. Usability playtest sessions showed us that players intuitively moved the mouse when the fish was hooked. Therefore, we listened and added it to our game. When the fish is hooked, players drag the mouse in the opposite direction of the fish’s movement to drain its stamina. We had arrows to tell the player which way to go.
Finally, players got more fish and we were able to advance through our game
What we learned: continue focusing on the fishing intuitiveness and find ways to make it more dynamic, UI/UX and art need to work together more for an even more cohesive player experience.
2. Add More Fishing Holes
The engineering team continued to add Unity features to aid designers. We added a new map feature as we simply duplicated fishing holes and played with their parameters. Players simply clicked on the map to move from one location to another.
By the end of this goal, we were able to transport the player and the boat to different locations, but we needed to double-check the camera and the fishing rod, follow the boat.
Some things that we had to keep in mind for the future were that the fishing rod should be attached to the main camera so that we never lose it, and we need to refactor and clean up the Unity scene before attacking Alpha.
3. Integrate More Narrative
To tackle narrative, we added more content to Yarnspinner and added more general content to the journal. Through this players were able to learn who Sosa was and that they were having to fish specific fish for his daughter
Expanding on narrative taught us that the environment in the game has to portray themes of grief, a lot of players missed the narrative because the placement of the Yarnspinner wasn't noticeable, and there needed to be an interaction when we first catch the fish.
