CasualShellfish

Monday of the last week, we started with a meeting in Onyx where we discussed whether or not we wanted to change the ingredients being limited or not.

Everyone had valid points and we ultimately voted and decided to keep the ingredients being limited but to increase the number of them you have each day.

Tuesday, we had a meeting where we discussed the controls and music. The issue of control scheme has been present for a while now with several playtesters being confused as to how to perform certain actions in the game.

After discussion we decided to make camera switching available only from the D-Pad and not also with the action buttons on the right as it was before. We also settled on making the cursor moveable with only the right joystick since this would seem most natural to most players that are used to aiming with the right joystick in other games.

Finally we also decided on having control scheme visible from the Pause Menu so that the player can easily check the game’s controls with the push of a button. Having it in the already implemented pause menu was also a decision made because we do not want to burden the programmers with even more work this week.

Then there was the issue of music or not. Some group members suggested the day before that we should not have any music in the game at all and simply rely on the ambient sounds. After discussion we voted and democratically decided to not implement any music into the game.

Most people in the group seemed happy with this decision, except Oscar. (Sorry.)

Wednesday, during SCRUM it was made apparent that we are very nearly done! We have a lot of bug fixing and a few quality of life additions, OH! AND A SMALL MOUNTAIN OF UI NEEDED.

But it's ok. It's fine. Gabriel, Malte and I are working on the "SHROOMPEDIA" and we're very nearly done.

Actual designer work I did today, besides helping with UI crunch;

- Asked the lovely George Ross for feedback, since Fabian had helped him playtest yesterday morning. A lot of the points George brought up was stuff that was either faulty at the time, broken, or not implemented yet. STILL! He found the actual objective of the game to be poorly communicated (True, it is.) and was ESPECIALLY confused by the limited/fluctuating ingredients each day, and the written "scroll" icon to start dialogue.

I figured that could be a relatively quick fix, by adding another page or two in the new-game slideshow.a

My mockup of the intro sequence

Final Version by Gabriel

Thursday-

Oh boy! I am in pain! I am getting arthritis by age 22 I am SURE of it.

That being said, everything UI-related is done!

I was able to push for some quality-of-life changes, such as; showing the amount of servings left that day, each time the cooking timer starts.

(That didn't make a whole lot of sense, basically; We have 4 soups served each day, so the player must make 4 separate soups with their limited ingredients in order to move on to the next day. HOWEVER, the player had NO WAY of knowing this, and thereby couldn't ration their available ingredients to plan ahead.)

- Pearl, at 11:41 PM, when punctuation is seemingly optional.

Added tooltip to Save Page

Added tooltip to Load Page

Added controls to Options Page

So, now we have a little counter showing how many servings are left that day. :D

Besides that, I was helping with the implementation of the final 3 particles, 1 of which we cut out entirely.

I was running back and forth between David and Linnea, trying figure out why the "soup-pour" particle wasn't playing correctly. Turns out it was in the wrong update(?), programmer stuff, didn't ask a whole lot of questions, just enjoyed the fact that it finally worked.

I oversaw playtesting for the majority of the day, whilst working on-and-off on UI (whenever I had a spare moment), and fetched (read:f̶o̶r̶c̶e̶d̶ GENTLY coerced), people from the other groups to playtest for us! Whenever the villager JSON's needed fixing I would write down the issue and then either solve it myself, or give it to poor, miserable Oscar. (He's OK! He just needs to sleep.)

I stuck around until now, (00:00) and playtested while Jonathan and Reymond (and Iskander) finalised the implementation of UI & Haptic Feedback.

I absolutely CANNOT WAIT to take a shower and sleep.