I am the lead designer of Group 2, the group that is making Portal Packaging. In terms of wanting to refine the player experience for what features we already had pushed into the game, this sprint was extremely successful. After our second sprint, we wanted to make sure that the playtest that we provided to any playtesters would give an accurate assessment of how people would interact with the game if they were uninhibited by any bugs and a decent understanding of what their goal for the game was.
The previous sprint, I had primarily focused on making the Narrator system towards the latter half of it. However, during our third sprint, I realized that my priorities were out of order and I should not have started developing the Narrator system so early. The narrator would be a nice addition to teach the player how to play the game, and it still will be an important addition that I will most likely be working on in the fourth sprint. But, considering that we were just entering the third sprint, I decided that what was much more important to the quality of the playtest were the quality of the levels that I designed.
The levels that I designed needed many iterations and adjustments in order to actually become suitable for players to mess around with. There were a couple of issues that I encountered when I was designing levels initially, the primary one of them being that I had not really designed levels like these for games before. The other issue was that I was not sure how to make a level longer or a puzzle more difficult without artificially inflating the difficulty and just putting more obstacles that were obnoxious for the player to get around rather than enjoyable and rewarding to get around.
First, second, and third iterations of the third level currently in the game.
These issues were not ones that I was able to really face until I started reworking the levels. Redesigning them went about as well as one might imagine, but it gradually got smoother over time as I began to understand what I wanted my core design philosophy for these levels to be.
There were a couple of main boxes that I wanted checked when I made the new levels. The first one was that the player would not be able to understand at a glance what they needed to do to solve the levels. This one was negotiable as the easier levels would need to be easier and help the player form an understanding of how the game was supposed to be played. However, as the difficulty of the levels ramped, so too did the appearance of complexity in each level. The nice thing about designing levels this way was that the solution did not necessarily need to be that complex, but as long as the player had to take a moment to think about solving them, they would be able to feel a sense of accomplishment from being able to solve it in the end. Another box that I wanted to check for at least a good portion of the levels was that I was actually incorporating the different mechanics that my programmer, Chase, had implemented. Thanks to him, I had a lot of different tools at my disposal to make levels that each felt unique from each other.
In order to make sure that I did not expand the scope too large and paced the group for the future correctly, I wrote a game design document that would serve as a useful reference for what features were currently in the game, what I could use to make levels, what we needed to add, and what we did not need in the game. As it was not directly impacting the progress of the game in the short term, it did feel a little unhelpful at the time, but it has already served me a good purpose to help our documentation and make sure that I do not keep brainstorming mechanics that get further away from the most important things about the game.
We held a playtest outside of class because class was canceled. I was able to get flour Kleenex playtests from allowing my housemates to playtest the game, and it was extremely useful because it reinforced that 1) people do find the game fun, 2) the levels were appropriately difficult, if not a bit too difficult, and 3) that the player enjoyment was curbed or increased by UI and indicators that helped the player place portals much easier.
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