Hey hey,
So this week we have been preparing for the Alpha. This Monday, 2018-02-12 we had our first playtesting in before the Alpha where we got quite good feedback. It would seem a lot of testers liked our game and they said it looked really well and was a good, so that was nice to hear.
Me personally have prepared for the Alpha presentation this week which will be on Thursday this week, 2018-02-15. I as the producer of the team will be holding the presentation where I will be presenting the concept we chose, why we chose it and what we are making. Apart from that, I have also gone through the feedback we got from the playtesting, and according to that, discussed with the group how we should work on with the game.
The two main topics I have covered this week, apart from the Alpha presentation, is designing how we want our enemies to look like, and also how the shooting from the player avatar would be. At first, our enemies was gray, and by the same material as the player avatar, because this would make sense looking at the narrative. The player avatars spaceship is stolen from the enemy and therefor it makes sense it is of the ”same” material as the enemies. However, this makes it quite hard for the player to identify who are enemies are who are not and what is going on, and also to be able to see the difference of the different enemies that we have. To solve this, we simply gave the enemies different colours, which gave a high effect. It was much easier to tell the enemies apart and see that they are different kind of enemies. We kept the player avatar gray, while we made the kamikaze enemies red and the shooter enemies green.
We were also discussing how we want the shooting to be. At first, the player could shoot fast projectiles or charge up the laster to shoot over the screen. However, this was kinda unbalanced since all the projectile were ”piercing” and went through the enemies. With this, it would not make sense for the player to power up the laser since there was no real benefit for this. We solved this pretty easy though by just making the fast, single projectile being a short projectile which dissapere after first enemy hit while if the player charged up the laser, it was a piercing laser which went in a straight line where the player is aiming from the cannon to the right of the screen, damaging all enemies it hits. With this change, the player now has two choices, either shoot fast at one enemy at a time or shoot a bit slower but damaging all enemies in a line.
niklasericssonblog 
Hey Niklas,
I have read your blog and I can say it was an interesting one. You have thoroughly described what improvements did you do with your game mechanics and aesthetics. First one, of different colours, was an easy and effective solution. I hope that change will result in a better response from the future players/ testers ( although it is a little bit harder to distinguish the spaceships and their projectiles from the background on this picture).
Another solution to avatar’s shooting mechanism is also interesting because it comes closer in line with the project requirements of having a basic shooting and power-up. And, who needs power-up if the primary weapon is of the same power as the secondary one (i.e. the power-up), right?
You have clearly covered all three questions of ”what”, ”how” and ”why” of those aspects.
One thing, however, I did not understand is- about this Alpha presentation. In the beginning of your third paragraph, you mentioned that you have covered it but I do not see any Alpha presentation described (except giving the date and time).
In the first paragraph, you have said that you as a team have been preparing for the alpha and I presume it was done via playtesting?
In the second paragraph, you said you yourself have been preparing for the Alpha and stated that you will present the concept of the game, and what have you had done so far. Maybe if you had given us a short description of the concept would have been nice (for those who don’t know that) and one or two concrete things you have done during your preparation and how have you done them (as a manager).
But, in overall, it was an interesting blog to read. I hope you will have a lot of good blogs in the future.
Best regards, Saša Džigurski
GillaGilla