I am the lead designer of the newly renamed Dimensional Delivery. Over the course of Sprint 4, the development of the game has progressed very well, with some minor hiccups along the way. Throughout this sprint, the primary roadblock that our group faced was that we encountered a lull in progress because we were preoccupied with needing to complete a project from CAGD 373. However, in spite of that, we still managed to make great progress as far as building and polishing the pre-existing features of the game went.
One of the primary tasks that I focused on across the course of this sprint was level design. At the start of the sprint, I designed around six new levels, and blocked out three of them within the Unity project. I only blocked out three of them because the other three levels were far too conceptual and they were intentionally unfun or unbeatable so that I could iterate upon them at a later stage.
The three levels that I blocked out which ended up making it into the Alpha playtest were designed to originally be difficult levels which would build on the gradually scaling difficulty of the prior levels. However, when testing the levels, I found that they were far too finicky and required portal placement that was too specific to be viable or fun for regular players to play. A major concept that I have learned from designing for mobile for Dimensional Delivery is that it is always incredibly important to consider if the player will be frustrated by smartphone controls instead of being benefited by them. So, for all three of the levels, I pivoted in the direction of utilizing them to teach players mechanics in the game that had been used in previous levels, but never implicitly explained.
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This was a fortunate decision, because we found from our playtest results that the game was far easier to understand in its current state in comparison to the previous playtests that we had done. The main changes were that there was an introductory level simply telling the player that they can place portals and move packages, and the aforementioned instructional levels let the players experiment and understand what the different gels did. The player was also taught about pre-existing portals that they did not need to place, but could still move packages through.
The other work that I did this sprint was to begin designing and creating art assets for the game. I created different star icons that we will use to reward the player for completing the level, finishing the level with less than the portals placed “par” and finishing the level with high package “health”. We will be implementing different tiers of difficulty for each level in the next sprint. If the player is a completionist and decides to complete all tiers of levels in a single level set, they will receive a Diamond Star.
All of the star icons, starting with the Diamond Star and ending with a "No Star" icon.
I created an app icon to be used for the app in the Google Play Store. It was pretty straightforward, though it may undergo some changes and iterations later in the current sprint. I also spent a lot of time designing the logo for the fake company that the player works for within the game. In hindsight, it may have been too much time spent, but the reason that it was important that the company logo looked decent or professional is because the main title card and game logo would be built off of the foundation of the in-game company logo. This icon is definitely going to undergo some changes, because it still feels somewhat amateurish. However, I do believe that with the current iteration, we are moving in the right direction with our style.
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