We've gained some feedback from playtesters about powerups not feeling as powerful as they should be, and players not knowing if they've hit anyone with their powerups.

I've been working on the gameplay side, adding additional impacts and improving collisions for existing powerups. I also helped program the hit markers on screen, which show when you've hit or knocked players off the map.

I reached out to any Discord server I could to do some closed playtesting using Steam Remote Play, letting players know that gameplay will be recorded, doing a practice match and turning off the HUD to get some footage. Getting playtesters for a multiplayer game is much more inconvenient than doing the same for a singleplayer game, since we were looking for 3-4 players to play at once. However, most of the time I had to be one of the players. That said, getting four other people together lead to everyone having a lot of fun, so while we were playing it seemed well worth it.

We got a lot of responses with the Google Form I handed out to playtesters, which have led to some great feedback. I created this form with lots of quantitative questions between 1 and 4 (because having a score of 5 meant people could give a neutral answer, which wouldn't be good data). Some particular topics we wanted more info on included the control scheme and favourite maps / Elixirs, where I also included some written responses for them to fill out.

• The most popular map for playtesters at the moment is Blizzard Bridge (according to their chosen favourite map), with the main reasons why being it's small size focusing on close-range combat, and the slippery ice making spells feel more powerful.

• The most popular Elixir for playtesters by far is the Water Tornado, which made a huge impression with how chaotic, funny and long-lasting it is.

The amount of fun players had (especially with 4-player matches) was a much needed boost to my energy. After fixing bugs for about 3 weeks straight, it was great to see that it was worth it to make sure these play sessions were as smooth as possible.

OK, here me out. At the time of writing, Valve's Deadlock has been gaining in popularity before it's even supposed to be publicly known yet. After playing that for ages, I decided to take some notes from their great Third-Person movement. Because of this, the Dash spell has finally been made omnidirectional, where players can now dash in whatever direction they move. During playtesting, I already saw players dashing side-to-side by instinct, so I believe this to be a net positive change.

Also, to improve the footage we got and improve the readability of the Push spell, I added an animation to make dolls hold their arm out while charging. This also makes the charging FX properly come out of the doll's hand, where I also made it grow in size as it is charged. This let me learn more about UE5's animation & blending systems.

I've been learning a lot about UE5 Blueprints due to my recent focus on bug fixes. In this case, I replaced the Water Bubble's use of removing controls and restricting movement, as I created a new Input Mapping and swapped out the default one with a custom one.

This new mapping doesn't include anything for movement or jumping but does allow players to retaliate while they are trapped. After having some concerns on whether stunning attacks would be too much in a party game, I feel this would at least let people use their Push spell (and emote!) while stuck in place.

The Launch spell (previously just the jump spell) was seperated into it's own button. Now, players responsively jump when pressing A, without having to release it.

By shifting the controls around, players can now hold LT (as the triggers feel good to hold) to charge the Launch spell, which now also lets the player jump much higher than before!

Overall, the major actions of the game have all been set to shoulder buttons and triggers after playtesting and discussion with the team. LB now casts the Dash spell because it's on the same side as LS for movement, and RB now throws an Elixir as this allows players to use RS for aiming without a claw grip while holding the button down.

(We've also already had some very positive responses about this control scheme, so I'm hoping it sticks as we continue playtesting.)

I've been consulting with our 3D Environment Artist, who has an awesome redesign cooking for Roller Boulder. In the meantime, I reprogrammed the map's infamous boulder to properly send people flying and not be stopped by anything.

However, during playtesting we also had some complaints that Spelleporter may be a bit too big as a map, especially in 2 player games. My solution to this is to fill the level with physics-based crates that players can push around and dash through (they also get affected by Elixirs!). Further playtesting has not had this complaint come up again and has made games more chaotic, so I plan to utilise these crates more in The Pit and potentially Roller Boulder too. 

Over these 2 weeks, I've had way more tiny changes that I'd like to justify design-wise. There were also plenty of bug fixes, which I'll list anyway to make myself feel better:

• Removed being able to ragdoll by pressing B

I grew fond of being able to ragdoll on command, and it was pretty decent for testing and debugging. However, playtesters did not respond well to it, as their initial reactions pointed to it not being useful or funny. It also allowed players to break so much of the game (skipping the pre-game countdown, escaping powerups, etc.), so now it's a disabled feature.

• Everyone in hill score points (no draws or lock-outs)

There still needs work to be done to show that multiple people are scoring, but this is my answer to some players not being able to score any points during a match. Playtesting already shows that players are having closer matches and are more inclined to jump in to score some points. However, there's still testing to be done to see if players need more indication on this new form of scoring.

• Added simpler controls display when loading in

We originally had a controller display that showed every available action to the player, but players never got the chance to read through the entire list (it was also really annoying to edit when we wanted to change the control scheme). Now, we are displaying the same 4 core actions that show up in-game as part of the HUD, so players can at least focus on a couple of them and understand that Launch and Push should be held down to make them more powerful.

The rest of these are bug fixes:

• Fixed being able to escape the pre-game cooldown

• Fixed players having a hunchback when spawning

• Fixed the end-game winner's circle

• Fixed spectator camera looking at nothing

• Fixed ragdolls escaping the map when hit with a spell

• Altered hill collision so players can jump while scoring points

• Players pushing physics objects is affected by that object's mass

• Added text to effect overlays

But first, I imported some final assets for Blizzard Bridge and Spelleporter from our 3D environment artist. Now the layout of Blizzard Bridge is much more curved and has these awesome curved staircases in the middle. Spelleporter also has these amazing teleporter structures that really pop out when using the toon outline in the shader.

Spelleporter also went through a few overall lighting changes, as our programmer has now imported a new skybox with a brighter, bluer sky. Now it looks much more vibrant, with the next step being to add physics props to really fill out the map.

Mainly, I've been sourcing and implementing some ambience for the overall game. While the game's awesome music and spells cover most of the sound base, I needed to add an extra layer of sound interactivity, as well as some impact sounds when fighting.

I sourced free-to-use footsteps sounds from trusty Freesound.org and implemented the system to dynamically play each footstep sound when it happens in animation. It also changes the footstep sound depending on the material. So far, there's brick, grass, snow and generic cartoon effects, where I think the latter works great with wooden surfaces.

I've been focusing down on playtesting the game, locally and across Steam Remote Play, where we've been focusing on applying the feedback we've gained as soon as possible, rather than adding new content.

However, I'm looking into adding more formal google surveys as part of our playtesting, with quantitative results. The main questions I've been looking for so far have mostly been about stand-out issues and price points, but it would help all of us greatly if we have more overall pointers on the game's general direction, gameplay and aesthetics.

This started out as a giant rotating meat roast that players would fight on above a large campfire. I thought it'd be a super fun setting to have but during development we got some complaints about tonal inconsistency. As such, I unfortunately had to replace the meat with our already established dungeon aesthetic.

I did up some code for the rotating cylinder months prior, so the work shown here was mostly applying textures, lighting and all the gameplay elements required for this to function. I also modified the layout slightly so players spawning on each end have more autonomy to gain a powerup and choose where on the cylinder they want to hop on, making players more confident to jump on and fight.

I completely changed the layout of this map, as I originally designed it much earlier before we got key feedback on having more open spaces that don't leave players with many ways to enter. This included removing the thin rickety bridges that this map was named after, but I prefer this new direction.

I made this map much more arena-like, using our programmer's new Ice Fields as part of the unique gameplay. However, to make this really shine I added some ice cubes that players can push and interact with, adding some more chaos that players can mess with. Testing this revealed I was right to make this a 'bowl' shape, since pushing players is so much more dangerous when they're slippery.

Visually, I added our artist's snow FX made earlier and utilised some free snow textures that I think work really well with the bright blue ambience. I also kept the bridges, but this time as immovable objects mainly for layout and colour variety. (I feel like maybe this should be called Blizzard Bowl now, but I'll let it sit for the moment.)

I also looked to improve the FX for the player's 'Push' spell. We received a lot of complaints about players not realising how much it's charged up and not being able to see how far the spell travels. I'm a lot less experienced with UE5's particle system that I am at its level creation tools, so I've used the knowledge I have and plan to improve it later down the line. (This took me a lot longer than it should have)

We did have a couple playtesters get confused about Ragdoll Rumble's Jump Pads, since they appear as just purple squares. As a improvement I added some FX in the direction that players get launched, so I look forward to properly testing if players respond better to them than before.