Hello again! This will be my final Devlog on this project for now. Since we’re now in the last week of the project there aren’t many new things we have time to add. But there are many things that can be improved. This became clear when we did some playtesting with people from outside of the project. There were a number of improvements that people suggested and that we have also decided that we want to add.

But first I want to talk a bit about our playtesting and the feedback we got. Overall I would say the playtesting went better than we had anticipated. Even with the limited gameplay feedback the game offers, people were able to get through the levels pretty well. But the issues were pretty apparent.

One of the recurring points we heard was that if you lost your rhythm it was hard to get back in the swing of things. This problem will hopefully be alleviated with a beat-tracker on the screen which shows the beat visually. We also want to incorporate all of the props and other things around the levels into the music so that they “dance” with the beat. This is mostly completed but needs to be synced up properly, it is currently a little bit off beat.

Another thing we realized was the way enemies attacked and displayed their attacks was very unclear. When enemies don’t attack they don’t display anything and at first glance you might say well that’s not a problem. But when you get used to enemies showing what attack they’re planning on using and then suddenly they don’t show anything it can quickly throw you off rhythm and that’s not a good thing.

This has now been fixed and they now display a question mark above their heads if they’re undecided on their attack and skips their turn.

This is what it looked like before the fix. There are some longer delays where the enemy doesnt display anything.

Now after the fix the enemy displays a Question mark when it is undecided.

So overall I’m very pleased with the playtesting even though we only had a few people try it. We got some valuable feedback and we are currently working on implementing changes to improve the gameplay loop of the game. We want to focus on providing more feedback to the player and we want to make sure it’s easier to stay on beat.

In other news, I expanded the Random Level Generation to allow for using different types of enemies depending on what difficulty you’re currently playing on. So that in later levels we spawn more difficult enemies. Something we noticed was that the people who got into the game quickly were able to go very far without being challenged very much so we made sure to spawn some harder enemies later on and we will see if that fixes that issue.

The way I did this was just a temporary solution because we don’t really have the time to write completely new systems in to the scripts at this point in the project. So I made a very quick solution to the problem and it’s quite inflexible. I have some ideas on how to improve it so it can be edited entirely from the Unity Inspector but I will only make these changes if the time that is left allows me to do it.

I also made a system to spawn various objects around the outside of the level to make it more varied and that’s where we want to spawn the objects that help you stay on beat. Currently we’re just spawning some “dancing” notes around the outside of the level. The way I implemented this was sort of in the same way I added the enemy scaling. I think it took me a total of 5 minutes to implement this system and it’s not very efficient but it does its job and since the game isn’t very demanding to begin with we just wanted to throw this system in to make the levels feel a bit better. In a bigger project that has higher hardware requirements this would obviously not be done in the same way but now when we have a lack of time we can afford to throw a few things in like this.

That’ll be all for me for now! As an ending note I would like to say I’ve very much enjoyed working on this project. I’ve tackled a problem that I had never tackled before which is Random Level Generation and I think it turned out very well. We had some big issues in the beginning of the project but I think overall we made a pretty decent game. I wish we had a couple more weeks to polish the game up and to add a couple more features but I am still proud of what we accomplished.

Thank you for reading!
Mattis