Finally the playtest (final, I guess) happened and I’m happy to see that a very small amount of alterations needed that I fixed the same day.
First of all the lighting pathways really work and testers managed to complete the game and find all the keys. However, I noted some of the “problematic” areas, which I thought were clear, but in practice – not. So I fixed them a bit like here:
Another major alteration was skipping the cutscenes, which were irritating if we had to reload the game and get to the place quicker. That wasn’t much of a coding problem for me, but for the intro cutscene, which aborted the first switch of the cameras, but din’t the rest of them. That’s when I was introduced to a new function for me – CancelInvoke. That solved the problem.
Apart that there were some very minor bugs, which I missed due to inattentiveness. Like I forgot to destroy the trigger of the cutscene that shows the door to second puzzle being open. But after another person played the game, I decided to leave it, in case player gets lost and want’s to see the hint again.
Another bug was with puzzle 2 where I placed the trigger that destroyed the reset trigger, assuming that if the player got to that place, they solved the puzzle first, in the wrong place. So I just moved it just behind the barrier, so that player will definitely get to it only is the first barrier is retracted. And player can’t have it retracted completely until they solve the puzzle.
And one more thing I noticed is that players tend to rush too much while playing and not paying attention to lights and where they lead. So I decied to add a disclaimer in the main menu, with some information on how the game works and what to expect from it. Hope that helps a little.
Conclusions
I believe that is the last developer entry as I feel like I’ve achieved everything I planned for the project. I only need to recheck everything one more time and make the final build. To playthrough video is coming up together with critical reflection on the project. Stay tuned!