Initial Piloting
Christian Lay-Geng
June 22, 2020
After completing the code of the basic structure of the game, I felt like the distractor bullets that I had were too different in shape and tip color, making it really easy for me to spot the targets from a good distance away. I opted to remove the green-tip bullet and instead put a non-colored bullet shaped like the target bullet instead (photo above).
Not only were the bullets easy, but the spawning was too. Since I was error checking as I built, I just spawned all of the target bullets at once. While this isn’t the case that other players than me would say this game was easy, the fact that many target bullets are right next to each other within a tight space still makes the searching relatively brief. To actually make searching more of an aspect, I opted to only spawn two-three target bullets at all times. In the future, I may actually change this number, depending on how difficult players say it is.
After my own play testing, I found that it was difficult to keep track of the number of targets that I had found. Also, I needed to give an idea as to what target bullets looked like. Showing the player a 2D picture in the lab may not help them understand what it looks like in 3D. So I created a counter that would increase every time they collected a bullet into the gun, while also displaying an image of the target bullet on the wall (photo above left). It was also in 2D, but at least they were rendered the same way. I also added a timer so players knew when the experiment was over (photo above right).