Development Process

The development process was plagued with bugs and coding issues. From the beginning, we ran into difficulties around the VR rig. There were issues with implementing John’s VR code into our game. As a result, we started from scratch and built around a fresh and new rig. In addition, we ran into some difficulties regarding the hands. The problem with the hands were eventually resolved, as we abandoned gesture-based controls for analog/trigger-based controls.

Asides from VR-related issues, we ran into a myriad of problems surrounding our scripts for the enemies. We struggled with triggering animations for attack, damage, and death; we ran into an issue with the Health Bar not working properly; and we ran into our enemy Game Manager as it wasn’t spawning the right waves of enemies. As a result, we spent countless hours fixing bugs rather than implementing new features. 

The scope of our project had to be lessened to combat the bug fixes. We wanted to add a variety of weapons to choose from, more enemies with varying damage and health, and better procedurally-generated enemy waves. We limited these and implemented a second boss enemy and polished the enemy waves instead.

After a lengthy bug-fix, we shifted our focus on polishing the existing game. We improved enemy animations, polished the Health Bar and colliders, added better models to fit the world, and fixed other issues regarding our enemy waves. Throughout the entire development process, we spent a lot of our time and resources into debugging. It was overall a frustrating and difficult experience. However, we wanted to publish a game that felt polished and full, so we persisted and implemented as many improvements as we could, given our scope.

Playtest Feedback

After the playtest session, our team received great feedback regarding the game. Among the feedback, we opted to fix key parts of the game. While there was room for polish, the main feedback revolved around playability and environment. As a result, we took the remainder of time to fix these issues. 

The key feedback we received was: restarting the game, feedback loops for enemy damage and death, progression of the game, and variety of the game. Fortunately, these issues were already acknowledged within our workflow, so we had no problem implementing fixes to update the game.