Development and Testing

Game Development Process:

Our approach to creating this game was to sit down and brainstorm a topic for a 2D platformer. Once we picked our topic, cave crawler, we just brainstormed and wrote down as many ideas we had for the game from weapons and mechanisms, to Player abilities and environmental obstacles. Then we sat down as a group and looked at our strengths and weakness and divided the work through tasks. We then began developing on our own time. We decided to start by building the environment and the player first as they are integral to testing othe mechanics. After meeting with other groups of developers and getting opinions after testing running our game we decided to remove and condense our goals by removing mechanics like a drill. After finishing the enemy and game loop we focused on testing and polishing the game by adding animations and refining the enemy script and AI.

Play Testing:

During our play testing with other developers we discovered that our physics for our player did not feel natural which led us to play around with heavier gravity and stronger jumping force. We also discovered a bug in our game loop that would immediately cause the player to fail which was an error in our player's health resetting. We  also learned that due to our mechanics that game felt better when the levels were more horizontally oriented that vertically oriented because it kept the momentum of the player more and made destructible environment more  fun. Our play testing also helped up realize that due to a change in player shape some of our platforms were difficult or impossible to reach. We also realized that overall the game's difficult was not rewarding but annoying which led us to change the chances and the frequency of our obstacles. Also we added more ammo for the boss as it was too difficult without that much ammo.