It's Blog Time!
Hi there, it's your friendly neighborhood Tempest Game Studio! Do you want to know what we've done this past month? Then you've come to the right place! On this page you can read all about our most recent escapades. Make sure to also check out our Archive to see our past achievements.
Playtesting and an MVP Crunch!
02/25/24
We're Back!
And we’re registered! This past week we officially registered for the OGPC competition on May 18th at Western Oregon University! We’re all very excited for the competition and have some great progress to share. We’re hoping to finish our Minimum Viable Product (MVP) in the coming week, a single level that represents the quality of work we want to see throughout the whole game. This will hopefully include sound (both sound effects and music), art, graphics, particle effects, a well-playtested level, and general polish and bug-fixing.
Department Updates
Game Design
Our game design process has started a new phase this month — playtesting! Playtesting is a vital part of the process as soon as there is something to play, and we kicked it off this month with playtesting sessions for our first night level. We got a lot of really useful feedback from this session (shoutout to our playtesters!), including feedback on the level– we did a great job with designing the puzzle, but the gameplay difficulty was higher than it should have been and the level felt too repetitive because of this. We took this feedback and revised the level, such as the speed at which debris is fired in the movement section at the start of the level. We also got excellent ideas about the game as a whole, about the level of difficulty we want in various sections of the levels and our level of help in puzzles. Level-specific feedback such as the feedback around the rate of firing early in the level will also help inform how we design levels looking forward, because it gives us greater insight into what a well-designed level difficulty looks like. We are looking forward to continuing to implement the levels we designed last month, and playtesting will continue on our soon-to-come MVP.
Story Writing
The story department collaborated a lot with the art department this month, and the story design helped to inform character and object designs in the game. Ari has begun to think about cutscenes, and there has been a lot of discussion around how we want to make those, what purpose we want them to have, and what we want them to look like. We’re working hard to differentiate story from gameplay, and methods to do so are in the works. Here’s a sneak peak at an early 3D model!
Programming
Our programming team has been hard at work creating robust systems for important aspects of the gameplay, two of which we want to highlight here: boxes, and robot lines. Many things in programming seem easier to implement than they are, something Noah has had the painful realization of while trying to create boxes. While they seem simple enough due to Unity’s built in physics and collider system, enough problems were arising with glitching into walls and janky controls that we decided to rewrite most of the player movement. Consequently, we needed to write our system for box interactions in a new way which took lots of development time and bug smashing. However, it’s now in a functional state and is much smoother and more consistent than before!
Nico implemented a system for adding robots into the scenes. These robots will eventually be zooming around the factory, building all sorts of things and getting in the player’s way. Currently you can easily design a custom path for the robots to move along, then in runtime the robots will move around the path, stopping before running into any objects or other robots in their way. However, there are still a few more features to add, including realigning the robots into their positions after they are stopped and letting the robots pick things up and put them down.
Art
The art department is continuing to face the daunting task of creating all of the necessary assets for the game, but have made a significant effort to reduce that task in time for the MVP. Nico, Paul, and Quinn collaborated to create designs for the charging station, pipes that expel debris from the factory, and said debris. They also created a checklist for all the art needed for our current aspirations for the MVP (and a little beyond), which is much more achievable than we might have feared. The art department is entering crunch time in the next few weeks, in order to publish the MVP with complete art.
Marketing
Part of our goal in joining the OGPC is to give all our members a sense of community, and we hope to achieve that every day, making work collaborative, coming together during meetings, and creating departments so members can join up with those who have similar interests. In fostering this sense of belonging, we also hope to be a unified team, and in order to present this unity to the world, our marketing team is proud to present to you our very own team shirts!
Final Thoughts
The pressure’s on, but we’re really excited for what comes next! As we power through an MVP, and we start looking towards polishing and expansion, our commitment to our core values of curiosity, creativity, and collaboration will be more present than ever. Keep your eyes peeled, we’ll have a lot of massive updates in the coming weeks!
Until we meet again!
The Tempest Game Studio team
Until we meet again!
The Tempest Game Studio team