#strandedinthestars

[kisujiart]

Dev Diary: Stranded in the Stars 8: Programming, Testing and Balancing/Polishing

Programming

As our team was nearing the submission deadline for our project... there was a lot still to be done. Fortunately I have a passing knowledge of Unity and C# and started helping out our programmer.

First off, I fixed an error preventing us from making a build of the game and implemented a credit szene which would automatically switch to the main menu after a certain amount of time. Now that we could finally export the game, we officially began with player testing.

Testing

For testing, I first conducted a private testing session with a few close friends who are experienced gamers. It was a bit sobering. It took them about an hour each to complete our game which has an expected runtime of about 15 minutes. Our game was clearly too difficult and apparently quite rage-inducing. In about two days, we rushed to make some adjustments too fix the most egregious of issues before the official playtesting session. Using the initial feedback of the private testing session as a basis, we handed out a feedback sheet as well as printouts of the level so that testers could mark problem areas. This testing session had players of all skill levels and went a bit better - though the game was still too difficult overall and still a tiny bit rage-inducing. We will go into the specific feedback and the fixes further below.

Balancing/Polishing

Unfortunately at this point, a few things went wrong. The person responsible for game design and balancing went on vacation and our lead programmer stopped doing any work. Meaning that most of the bugfixing/balancing/polishing work fell on me, the only other person who was familiar with Unity. For some reason I was terrified of telling our programmer that he wasn't doing enough work, but after a few days of working on my own, I bit the bullet and asked what the heck was up. It turns out that he thought we had one more week before the submission deadline and was taking it easy. Cue a week of late nights fueled by caffeine and crunching together on Discord. On the upside, it was the best teamwork we ever had.

As per the feedback from the players I implemented the following fixes:

Some jumps seemed impossible because of the placement of the damaging spikes. Some spikes were damaging players even though they touch them. Changed the placement of certain spikes and adjusted the hit boxes of the spikes to be pixel-perfect.

If you died, you had to start from the beginning - which was very frustrating if you were already trying for an hour. Checkpoints were requested. I implemented checkpoints where player would respawn once they passed them.

The difficulty jumped too much from the 2nd to the last level. The boss enemy was too fast and almost impossible to outrun. I lowered the speed of the boss. Still challenging, but not punishing to the point of failing one single jump.

The small enemies were stationary and almost completely non-threatening. I created a behaviour script for the small enemies so that they would patrol and follow the player if close. I also tripled the damage that the player would take so that they would die after touching the small enemies three times. This encouraged players to outmaneuver the enemies using timing and to use the wall jump strategically.

The level design had some entirely useless paths. Fixed by a more strategic placement of the enemies, collectables and respawn points.

Testers found the level change by collecting the key item "sudden" and didn't understand how it narratively related to the level change. While picking up the item was still a requirement to finish the level, I implemented "teleporters" to explain the level change itself.

The text on the screen was too slow and disappeared too fast to read. I increased the text speed and let it remain on screen for longer.

The jump sound was too loud I lowered the volume of the jump.

The boss enemy was missing sound I created trigger zones so that the boss would play certain sounds when passing them.

That was how much we were able to fix just before the submission deadline.

Remaining Bugs

At this point, our game felt a lot more like a "game". Awesome!

Unfortunately, as I wasn't nearly as experienced in programming as our lead programmer, there remained a few bugs that I couldn't solve before publishing. Moreover, some of the new features introduced bugs of their own.

First of all, as it turned out, adjusting the hit boxes of the spikes to be pixel perfect didn't entirely fix the problem of players "getting caught" on them. Part of the problem was the player's square hitbox itself, which I didn't know how to fix at the time.

Also, if you revisited previous checkpoints, it would overwrite your "newer" checkpoint and it wouldn't correctly respawn the collectibles.

Further, enemies could get "stuck" between following their patrol path and following the player and just remain in place.

And these are just the big bugs that I am aware of. There are probably loads more. Looking back, a lot of those bugs were mostly due to my inexperience. I have grown a lot as a programmer since then and it's funny how much I struggled with such simple problems.

This post became entirely too long. If you made it this far, why not read the last part of the series below:

Part 9: Cover Art and Conclusion

[kisujiart]

Dev Diary: Stranded in the Stars 9: Cover Art and Conclusion

And thus we have reached the last entry of the Dev Diary series.

After the stressful last two weeks before the official submission deadline, there was one last thing to be done: The cover art. Our game was slated to be published in our university's online game showcase some two months later and it needed a cover. At the time, I was majorly inspired by Patrycja Wojcik's art. I wanted to incorporate all the key elements of the game without giving too much away: The fireflies, the environment of the first level, our retro-looking astronaut and a hint of the enemies in the shape of the looming red moon.

We also hoped that it would be displayed at our university's open student project exhibit where the general public could come in and play our game. Sadly, it was cancelled that year, so that didn't pan out.

Where can I play the game?

Our group never came to a conclusion whether we want to polish the game some further and officially publish the game anywhere. I am also not sure if my former team members would feel comfortable having their old work showcased online. Because of this I am not going to offer a download link or the like. Sorry! I hope you understand.

Conclusion

I initially started this series 4 years ago. Recently, I've been wanting to use my tumblr again and it felt wrong to leave this series unfinished. Now that some years have passed, I don't remember some details as well anymore, which is why this dev diary is heavily skewed towards my contributions. But it wasn't just me, there is a lot of unseen work from other team members and it wouldn't have been possible without them. Team "Irrelevant Games" consisted of six people. Our scrum master, our lead programmer, our environmental artist, our level/game designer, our writer/music producer and of course, me.

The game that we ended up with is far from perfect. A lot of early ideas had to be scrapped. The wrong priorities were set. Also the vast majority of my team had no or little prior experience in their roles. It was difficult reconciling our art styles in the game and even though I had more experience in digital art, I also made maaaaany mistakes. Mostly due to inexperience and also, laziness coupled with arrogance.

But, I also exceeded my own expectations, went out of my comfort zone and learned from my mistakes. And so did everyone else. This project was one of the single best things I have done for my self-esteem. I am proud of what we made, because, in the end it's a finished game. The vast majority of game projects fail in the early stages.

Anyway, I ran the game recently and almost died of cringe. I hope you enjoyed reading this series!

[kisujiart]

Dev Diary: Stranded in the Stars 7 - Concept Art & Implementation of Level 3

As one of the two artist working on the game, I was responsible for the visual design of the third level. While I was initially excited, it was quite a challenge!

The idea behind the level was that the player was going to meet the boss on the enemy's turf. As such, it should have a feeling of "alien technology" and feature lots of triangles and the colours red and magenta.

As usual, I collected some images to make a moodboard for the level. Dead Cells was just released and served as a major inspiration. I think I also recently watched Darling in the Franxx or perhaps it was Fate Apocrypha? I am not too sure where that anime screengrab is from. If anyone recognizes it, please let me know! The other images are mostly from artists on Artstation :)

When it actually came to putting all this "inspiration" into a cohesive design, I struggled a lot because this was my first time designing an environment. It doesn't look like much, but there was so much redrawing, ugh.

The actual level itself was split into 4 layers. In the very front are the platforms that the player is running on, followed by three parallax layers in the background. As this was pretty close to our deadline, I couldn't find the time to make a custom tilemap and instead recoloured an existing one (the screenshot is from before the recolour).

To be honest, this is my favourite level out of the three. I might be biased though :p

Part 8: Programming, Testing and Balancing/Polishing

[kisujiart]

Dev Diary: Stranded in the Stars 6 - Enemy Animations

When animating the enemies, I quickly learned how big of a mistake it was not to plan out a side view and a view from the back of the character designs. Since animating this, I have learned more and wish I would have put in some anticipation frames prior to the attack.

Our programmer took off some of my workload by using Unity's animation tools to animate the more simple enemy type #1. I love the result!

I also made a more detailed render of a the enemy type #2 to be animated in a similar manner, but unfortunately it didn't make it into the game due to time constraints.

Part 7: Concept Art & Implementation of Level 3

[kisujiart]

Dev Diary: Stranded in the Stars 5 - More Animations & Normal Maps

One of the big sticking points of our project was that everybody loved how the character was illuminated by light on the concept art (link here if you want to check it out). The question was, however, how to do dynamic lights on a 2D image? Our programmer found out a solution using normal maps. While it would have been better to hand-draw the normal maps, due to time constraints we ended up autogenerating them. Looking back, I am not sure if I like the result.

Speaking of looking back, I am seeing so many mistakes on the idle animation I made, oh no.

Anyway, with the characters main animations done, it was time to move on to the NPCs. First of all... the King of the Isoden! Taking on a familiar humanoid shape to communicate with the player, I had a lot of fun animating all the sparks flying around. And then there was the totally-not-annoying sidekick of a sprite "Glowee" who sadly got less screentime than they deserved.

Part 6: Enemy Animations