Today was the last workday of the week due to tomorrow being a holiday.

Over the day we have mostly been discussing once again. Most of the discussions regarded the new sounds we’ve gotten yesterday as well as some we got today. The music we have now is pretty much perfected after all of the music designer’s reiterations. A lot of the sounds from the sound desigers have also begun to be finalized, but some are not quite there yet. The discussions regarding which sounds were good and which would need some reiterations lasted throughout the morning.

During the afternoon us designers finalized the descriptions for the upgrades. We went in with the mindset of making each of the descriptions understandable to anyone. Though we still had to ensure that they describe everything properly.

I also did some tweaking with enemy damage numbers to see if I can get a good balance between damage taken and health gained. Though we currently are having issues with the game freezing or sometimes even crashing due to the amount of objects being spawned. However, this is an issue that is being worked on.

We have also gotten a lot of the final things working and are only really needing the animations to be finished. But that will have to wait until next week.

Today has been a very slow day, mostly consisting discussions as well as some additional playtesting.

Most of said discussions revolved around sounds. More specifically which of the recorded death sounds for the player character we prefered. We were given a two minute soundfile of various death screams to pick and choose from.

We also discussed the name of the game for a bit, but realized after a while that we were wasting too much time on it. Other than that, we also had a lenghty discussion regarding some variables to finalize before we get playtesters from outside the group. Most of said finalizations regared the upgrades we had playtested.

The programmers also helped us designers make a proper build to use for the out-sourced playtesting. We had tried to make one yesterday, but stumbled upon some errors whilst doing so.

Most of my playtesting today regarded the lifegain from attacking enemies, but I didn’t get too far due to all of the discussions had.

As workdays go, today hasn’t felt all too productive for us designers. We have done plenty of playtesting, but I feel like the process has slowed down now that we are finalizing most of the variables.

Nevertheless, most of my time today has been spent on testing the life gain of the player. I did this due to the player feeling a bit too unkillable when it comes to health at the moment. We also don’t want to increase the enemies damage too much, as it could get out of control in too big crowds.

When it came to how I tested it, I set the health the player gains from killing the basic enemies to zero. I did this because I felt like it was unnecessary when we already had a system for gaining health on each hit. However, I did keep the health-gain on a kill on the variant enemies we have. This choice was made due to there being fewer of them as well as them being more powerful than the other enemies.

I set the health gained per hit to five percent of the damage dealt to the enemy by the player. The starting-value of the health gain was ten percent, but that felt like it was too much as the player could easily clear floor without any real thought. My testing with these values are not yet finished, but so far they have felt more fair.

We also did plenty of bug-hunting throughout the day, and I found a part of a wall that was missing a collider. As such, the player could just walk through and fall into oblivion. Thankfully it was an easy fix, but something that’s good to take note of for future testing.

Today has been mostly consisting of discussions regarding music, variables in the game as well as art.

We had been given a lot of additional sounds to give feedback on as well as updates to the music the music designer has been working on. Some of the sounds were old sounds that had been reworked after previous feedback from us. We also recieved a few voicelines which had been recently recorded in a studio by our sound designers. Although only a few had been given to us for now, as they have many takes to go through and decide upon which to keep. The music is doing very well at this point, though the main themes are also

Other than that, we had a lot of meetings during the afternoon, regarding how we should proceed with the feedback given to us during the beta presentation amongst other things. Some of the discussions had regarded what we have learned during playtesting as well as agreeing upon values.

Our artists also had a lot of discussions regarding their workflow as well as structuring their meetings. Us designers also had a somewhat lengthy discussion with the level artists regarding population of the map in terms of furniture. The artists weren’t sure how much they could ubstruct the players movements. Though we concluded the discussion by letting the artists populate the levels as much as they want and us designers will give feedback if some furniture is too obstructive.

Today marks the end of the beta period of the project, and left is the three weeks of polishing the game until we reach the gold presentation. With the gold presentation also comes the end of the project.

We have managed to get most things represented in the game so far, missing only the placeholder animations as well as most of the sound and music. There were also some issues with running the game on the playstation 4. This was due to the spawning of objects like enemies and projectiles were severly slowing down the game. The game even froze at times due to the severity of the issue.

Though we will begin testing a whole lot more on the playstation 4 itself to better optimize the game for the end of the project. This is due to us getting the feedback that we should regularly test it on the console, which was something that personally slipped my mind. Plenty of other feedback was also given to us and will go a long way in helping us shape the game we want at the end of this all. Most of the feedback regarded how some things weren’t implemented even as placeholders, which is something we will get to at the start of next week.
We were also asked to fix the lighting as the current build is very dark, which is something that the environment artists have gotten right into.

As for what I did today, most of the day has been spent playtesting. Specifically I have been bughunting to try and find effects of various causes that need fixing. Me and some other designers found out that some rooms don’t spawn enemies like they should.

Not much else happened due to the beta presentation, but we look forward to continuing our work next week.

Today was heavily spent on playtesting the game to find bugs as well as testing out some values on the player as well as upgrades.

Some of the bugs we found were thankfully easy to fix as they related to how the rooms were randomized. One of said bugs was that the doors were blocked in places they weren’t supposed to.

As for the values I tweaked, most of them related to the players survivability against the hordes of enemies. I also followed a list of parameters us designers have made to see what we have tested and finalized versus what still needs testing. One of the main things I tested out was the player’s ability to steal health from enemies based on how much damage they deal. Most of my tweaking on that ability was how high of a percentage the player should gain.
Though I also tried out the upgrades that were finally made available in the current version of the build, mainly to check if they work as intended before I headed on to balancing them. One of the issues I did find was that an upgrade that gives you the chance of using an ability for free once didn’t actually make it free, which was another easy fix for the programmers.

Other than that, it has been hard to keep up with all the changes happening to the game at this stage. Most of the changes are happening thanks to the beta presentation being tomorrow afternoon. A lot of pep goes to the programmers who have been working diligently throughout the day to add everything to the game as well as fixing errors that have occured.

Today has been a slow day, mostly due to the issues with the current build. The issues arrived from a bad merged between the build of our player-team and the main build.

Thankfully the issues have been resolved during the morning and we got to add the last things us designers needed to fix for the build during the afternoon. Now we have ourselves a build with a lot of the programmer’s and our work in it. We also have some nearly finished rooms from the level artists added to it as well. The character art and animations are not yet fully done, but they are coming along smoothly.

In the afternoon, us designers have been playtesting the upgrades, but didn’t get too far as we only managed to add everything to the game fairly late.

But tomorrow, we will have the ability to test the upgrades to our hearts content.

Today we were given bad news as our main animator is feeling overworked and burned out. We learned this just before lunch but suspected something was off before that.
They had told the rest of our artists about it who in turned told us designers.

The cause of this has both been the fact that they have been the sole animator until some of our other artists would be free to help. The tasks have also taken longer than anticipated to finish alongside some setbacks, meaning his help kept getting pushed further and further away. Some of the blame will also fall on a lack of communication on both parties, as we should have asked them more about how they’re doing and they should’ve come with their concerns earlier before it became an issue.
To help solve this, we have further diligated more manpower towards animation to leviate the their stress.

Other than that, we have been giving feedback on a lot of the sounds that the sound designers have made. There was a lot of sounds that were going in the right direction, some that felt outright done as well as some that wasn’t in the ballpark. The sound designers took the feedback and have begun to iterrate on them. The music designer has also given us a revision of the elevator music that was a bit controversial at first. Though the revision was much better and fit right in with the vision of the game. This revision might come to be the final one for the game as well.

I have also been doing some level design again today, as we had to make prefabs for the rooms. We did this so that when we revise the rooms, we don’t lose all the spawnpoints everytime. The spawnpoints I added are not final, but the ones from my original draft for them to use temporarily.

As a whole, the project is coming together slowly but surely. There have been plenty of issues regarding art, but things are coming back on track.

The start of week six has begun and the Beta deadline is looming over us.

Us designers have been finalizing the values we want the variables to have in the current prototype. We did this so that all of us have a unified set of values to change and iterrate on further down the line. The morning of today was spent on further working on our values as our lead designer had to prepare for the sprint review. I tweaked a bit more on the players dash to get it to a good state as well as the player’s melee attack range. When changing the dash, I wanted to find a sweet spot in between the dash being too floaty and too snappy. This basically translates to not wanting it to feel like the player levitates away nor like the player is teleporting rather than moving very fast. As for the player’s melee range I wanted it to reach further than the enemy melee range as well as feel like a realistic reach of a katana.

During the afternoon us designers discussed the values we had tested and decided on which to keep. We ended up with a dash that was slightly snappier than the one I had tested my way towards, but it still felt fine if not better than the one I had. The reach of the player melee was made slightly shorter, but it did follow the pattern of the enemy having less reach than the player.

We also had a big discussion regarding guiding the player throughout the levels without holding their hand too much. We have had suggestions of having a minimap and another of having signs that appear behind the player after they enter a room. After a lot of discussion, we came to the conclusion of having people from the other project come in and playtest to see how big of an issue the disorientation of the levels really is. After that, the discussion will be picked back up whether we go for guiding or not.

Another week has now passed and plenty of things have been done, despite some issues arising.
The sound and music designers have begun full production of the assets we have requested. Judging by the small tests we have recieved, we can clearly tell that they’re heading in the right direction.

Our artists have been progressing steadily with their assets, only having a few hiccups. These hiccups have been resolved thankfully by dividing the workload differently.

The artists have progressed a lot and have managed to fix a lot of the bugs us designers have found.

Meanwhile us Designers have been discussing quite a lot regarding sounds and music, trying to find the right direction to point the sound and music designers in. We have also had meetings regarding how to divide the workload of our artists.
Aside from that, we have done a whole lot of playtesting.

Today us designers made plenty of changes to the variables to get our own versions that fit our visions. Though this will be discussed on Monday as we ran out of time designing. I mostly focused on the players dashing as well as how powerful the enemies should be in comparison to the player.

But now I will take a necessary break over the weekend.