Hello Everyone!
We are finally in beta! After the 4 days Squidditch has been in beta, we have taken in a lot of feedback from peers and come up with a few things that we need to change. Some before the feedback, and some after too. Gameplay with the channels feels a little too rigid, not enough player feedback on enemies getting inked as well as the player getting knocked out by the squid, Customisations ran into the problem of trademark and Animation quality needs to be rampped up.
We have got a lot to do before the full release, which is coming out on the 4th of August! Clear your calendars folks, because the hype train is about to leave the station!
Gameplay
In our current state of the game, we have 5 channels for the players to move along. When they tap on the left and side of the screen, they jump to the left, vise versa for the right. But we felt like the movement in between each channel was too static and rigid. You are underwater after all! So let’s add a little life into those jumps, what we will probably do is use Lerping to move from each channel to smooth that out a little bit
Player Feedback
When the player plays the game, you will often see the enemies just disappear when you hit them with your ink. This doesn’t really inform the player what happens to them, in fact this looks more like you are ‘Killing’ the squid, which is not what we want. Seeing as this is for all ages we don’t want the player to think they are killing the squid, more so just stopping them from moving up the screen.
How we will fix this as by having a small animation for when the enemies get hit by the ink, having them spin out of control, fall back down the screen as well as shrinking them. Looking like they are falling through the ocean. We will do the same for the player, except when the player falls to the bottom of the screen, it will bring up the end game menu screen.
Customisations
So when we went to upload the game file to the google play store for it to be assessed we ran into a problem… All the trademarked characters that we had in the game ment it got rejected.
So because we got rejected, we had to change the customizations around a bit. For example, the mario hat we used got filled in red and called ‘The Italian’. So it is still a reference to mario itself, but now becomes more of a homage than a direct copy of the hat. Along with some other changes to other customisations. Soon we will reveal the up coming customizations for the octopus so stay tuned! We will announce them on Facebook and Twitter!
Animation Quality
The animations we have at the moment are really choppy and pixelated. We are not happy with this and will work on fixing them as soon as possible. We are fairly sure on what the problem is and will probably get that fixed within the next few days!
So overall, some big changes to the gameplay and some big changes to the customisations! Hopefully we get all of this done so you can ink your way to victory! Thanks for reading!
Again, the full release is coming out 4th of August!!! All aboard the hype train!
If you would like to play the beta on Android click here:
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