Testing

This marks the final devlog for this project. The game is currently in it's 9th iteration (version 0.9) and has all the main features implemented. A couple of ideas I had never made it to the project in time for the deadline for the university unit this game was developed for, notably silencers and AI memory, two features that would've made the 'stealth' aspect of this stealth action game a lot deeper.

AI memory was a feature which would've allowed the enemies to remember where they last saw the player once losing sight of them. This same functionality would've set a "player last seen" point on the location where the player last fired their gun unsilenced, leading into a feature which would've made the player think harder about each shot they take, with a silencer which only allowed 3 shots before breaking.

Other than those 2 features, the game is complete. In the lead-up to this devlog, I performed a testing session, getting a few other students to play my game and provide feedback through a google form. Screenshots for each question from the form are included above

The first question was about level size, as you can see, the size of each level was just the right size, no changes needed here.

These next 2 questions are related, and I know why only 2 people managed to finish the last level. At the time of testing, I wasn't aware that the "retry" level button didn't work on the 3rd level, meaning players had to restart the whole game when they died. Obviously for a game that expects the player to die frequently and learn from their deaths, this was not good. It skewed my data slightly as I didn't get any feedback on the later half of the 3rd level or on the ending.

These 2 questions are also related, I figured if I could make a game that gave a good challenge, but still felt fair and fun, then I'd succeeded in my ultimate goal as a game developer. Espionager is a difficult game, you die fast, things happen fast, you need to react and learn to succeed, which each player pointed out as such as they played without my prompting, which felt good.

Now we get to the part where I find things to work on. Over all, the things that needed the most work were the enemy AI and the core game mechanics. Shooting and stealth have undergone changes since this testing session, players get a max of 15 bullets and 15 health now, meaning players can take 3~ shots before dying, rather than 2 (enemies still take 2), and they can hold more ammo as I found players were using 3-4 shots to take out 1 enemy and then soon run out of ammo and die, so I decided this needed to change so players have more of a chance to explore for ammo pickups before this happens.

Movement speed of stealth is unchanged, I don't want it to be a god-mode button that gets you out of every encounter, it is a tool to use in specific situations to get out of combat in an emergency, and when you think you can sneak past an enemy within the 5 second time window. So I'm sticking to my guns here and keeping stealth as is.

"Tutorial assets" refer to the assets provided to the students during the unit tutorial sessions, I used these to save time on things like sprites and particle effects, because I knew that the core mechanics and level design would soak up the majority of my time, so I decided to spend my time focusing on those 2 elements, and making custom sprites for pre-existing entities a lower priority, which unfortunately means enemies and the player have either tutorial asset sprites, or basic circular sprites. I wish I had more time to change this, as I was working on my own custom sprites (as seen in previous devlogs), but I have run out of time for working on things like this, where I wanted to spend more time ironing out bugs and making the game feel more fun.