We learned a lot throughout our creation process and one take away I have throughout this experience is that clear communication can drastically improve workflow and help create a cohesive product. My team continuously kept trying to find better and better ways to communicate and I think this really helped us in the end. We made sure to give each other appropriate feedback on our work and tried to improve each of the things we were making. Below is the series of stages in our development process and how we decided to make changes throughout the course of State Shift's creation.
Production Cycle Overview
Here is a brief overview of what we did in each stage which is detailed more below:
Game Concept Stage
• Drafted Game idea and Mechanics
• Came up with Environment and Character ideas
• Got a production timeline set
Prototype Stage
• Implemented various states of matter + some of their systems
• Created a mock level to showcase things
First Playable Build Stage
• Got some tutorial levels implemented
• Refined matter changing
• Got player animations in
Alpha Stage
• Started outside of team playtesting
• Added sound effects
• Improved and implemented various UI features
• Improved player movement
Beta Stage
• Further playtesting
• Updated environment aesthetic
• Bug Fixing
• Final polishing touches
Game Concept Stage
Our Team started our with the idea of making a puzzle game involving changing the states of matter. To help focus our ideas we created a Game Design Document which is embedded below. We formulated some mechanics such as plasma powering doors, liquid going through pipes, and solids being moved to hold down pressure plates. For our character we had already found a good asset to represent a science test subject and for the environment we were hoping to take inspiration for portal 2D.
At this stage we also set up a timeline for production to help us estimate what we could get done and what we should focus on. We also established our target audience to help us dictate how hard our puzzles should be. Since we wanted to target kids we decided to make the puzzles fairly obvious and straightforward. All of this is shown below in some of the slides from our concept presentation.
Game Prototype Stage
Next we went fast to work on our initial prototype. Throughout the creation process we initially focused on making matter feel good to change and the systems that they were used in. At this stage we were using key binds to change matter and were still figuring our some of the uses of different matter states. During prototyping we came up with the idea to use solids to block turrets fire which hadn't originally been intended. This became one of the most interesting game feature in my opinion. Things were still buggy at this point but we had a good idea of the things we wanted to change. Below is our prototype video and some of the slides from our prototype presentation.
One challenge we faced during this stage was getting liquid to work and feel natural. Liquid in 2D is normally a hard task. There are two ways of representing it with the first and easier option is having a static body of water with a sin wave at the top (normally entering it spawns a particle effect). The second is what Where's My Water does. In that game liquid is represented by multiple balls/water drops that merge together. Since our game did not need a stationary body of water we were forced to go with the second option. We also didn't want water drops splitting up so we decided to make it into a blob like object with multiple balls connected to each other. This turned out ok in our opinion and helped with the pipe system we wanted to use for liquids.
First Playable Build Stage
After we finished prototyping, we decided that changing matter via key binds was rather confusing. So we created a radial selection wheel with obvious matter icons. This helped make it obvious to players which state of matter they were changing to. We also created the initial two levels which were an introduction to movement and solids. To help players learn faster we added environment text in addition to the AI voice over.
Alpha Stage
For our alpha we started doing large batches of playtesting. We sent out our game to many people and got some great feedback. I found that our best feedback was gained from one on one playtests where we got to watch players as they played the game. Some things we noticed were that certain tutorials were confusing to players such as requiring solids to be combined for pressure plates. Players also were scared to jump off of high ledges so we added arrows pointing downwards to let them know that it was safe. Lastly, a big complaint that we got was our player movement which is something we refined heavily after this. Here is a video of some of the gameplay and also the changes we made prior to alpha.
Beta Stage
By this stage our game was practically done and we set out to polish our game. Below I have changes we made since alpha. Most notably the environment aesthetic and the player movement were. I think at this stage we had finally gotten the player movement polished and it started to feel like a great game. After this we conducted beta tests similarly to how we did alpha tests. One on one playtests helped us find more bugs which play-testers probably wouldn't have mentioned in our feedback forms. Through this we were able to address all of the major concerns players had and helped us reach our final product.