the Exhibition

This week we have been preparing our game to present at an exhibition where students from different disciplines from my university were required to exhibit our work. We spent a lot of time trying to ensure that our most recent project, “Plantagonist” was presentable.Unfortunately it wasn’t to say the least and I will explain why now:

• There was very little feedback in the game at all to let the player know what they were doing at all
• The only thing noticeable that relates to feedback in anyway is that when the player collides with an ant they lose a petal (the petals are essentially a unique way to convey player health)
• There were no collisions with walls meaning that players could swing their character straight through them, making the game a lot less challenging and fun
• We were missing a few scenes from our opening cutscene leaving the players a little bit confused about the story of the game, Luckily the game isn’t very story driven and is more of an arcade experience
• A lot of the items in the game didn’t do anything at that point leaving a lot of players confused
• The main thing that annoyed a lot of people was the hitbox for the main character was far too large and they would collide with things a quarter of the screen away from them

On a positive note, a few people complimented the artstyle of the game which made me happy because, I generally worked on the art side of the project but in the end it was upsetting that we couldn’t present the game in a more playable form. This was a little expected seeing that we had only been working on the project for 4 and a half weeks which isn’t a lot of time to create a fully-fledged game. This has been a good experience to let people test our game and give us feedback about the gameplay and art.