As mentioned the last week, we’ve started this week with a fresh batch of user tests that took a closer look at the re-worked tutorial as well as a new and rather stormy level. Right after the first test we noticed that some elements required some serious tweaking so we did just that and turned some knobs, changed some numbers and improved this part greatly. The feedback was, as usual, very valuable and gave precious insights.
Since we’re knee-deep in user tests, we’ve spent the majority of the week with brainstorming, designing and building a few new situations for the second environment, the karst. Some of them introduce new wildlife critters that do not appear in the first part, some of the other gameplay situations introduce new environmental challenges, which also require a few new mechanics. We’re curious about the outcome and the feedback and are looking forward to another week of heavy testing!
We know you’re curious about all the new wildlife we keep adding to Chasing Aurora. A hint: some of the new critters that we’re working on are more birds. Fierce, and sometimes clingy, birds. But more about them later.
The Lammergeier (Photo taken by Richard Bartz)
And then there are the fish. They’re part of the game for quite a while now and we keep returning to them because they’re too much fun to interact with and have proven themselves to be a good environmental element. Fish can’t live without water, that’s a well-known fact, so we’ve also been working on providing them a proper environment to thrive and prosper. While we were at it we also decided to throw in a few waterfalls, to set the mood… and add another environmental hazard to the game.
More and more sounds have found their way into Chasing Aurora. Some of them are there to create the right mood, but some have much more depth and, also, a guiding function. On top of that, we’ve received some of the music and implemented it, so the upcoming user tests will also focus on how sound and music intertwine with the gameplay.
You might think we’re solely focusing on the single player mode, but you’re wrong, WRONG! We’ve also invested quite some energy into the multi-player mode. The new mode we’ve mentioned in previous blog posts has been tweaked and tuned, and re-tweaked and re-tuned several times. Each iteration more fun than the last one. But we know we can do better!
Last, but not least, there’s this announcement we’ve been spending time on. “I haven’t seen any announcement?”, you may ask. Rightfully so, because we haven’t announced it yet. So, stay tuned and find out what we’re talking about.
This week’s achievements:
- Conducted even more user tests
- Built more scenes for karst
- Fish added
- Waterfalls added
- More birds added
- Implementation of music
- Extreme multi-player tweaking
- Announcing the upcoming announcement