Monster Mash Update

Updating Monster Mash

For the next few weeks, we were tasked with updating our game, implementing improvements based on player feedback, or anything we else we wanted.

Feedback

We received a wide range of feedback from different groups who played our game.

Looking at the feedback, I do feel as though much of it I agree on. 

One of the major issues players faced was being able to unzip and play the game, as it was zipped as a RAR file which many users were unfamiliar with and could only extract with specific software. We made sure it was a priority that we updated the game as a ZIP file, to heavily increase accessibility

Much of the feedback also complimented the character design, which I agree was well-made and implemented.

A big complaint was also related to movement and controls, ranging from the controls being unresponsive and slow, to them just being downright confusing. I don't think there is much to be worked on with the confusing controls, as there is controller support as well as keybind options so it's up to the player to tune them to their liking. The character inputs being slow is true though, and I believe that to be a fairly easy fix and to only require some number tweaking.

From this feedback, Finlay composed a list in the discord outlining jobs for each person to help improve upon all the issues with the game.

Implementing changes

My job ended up being just improving upon some of the UI, mainly adding a new map selection screen.

This ended up being very simple, as all I had to do was change the start button for starting the game, and instead have it open another menu. This did require a little bit of recoding, however, as the original menu wasn't designed for multiple pages.

The design for the select page was very simple, it only included the name as well as a screenshot. I added a screenshot of each map because I thought it was important that players were given a visual representation of each map so that they can easily identify each one without having to memorise the names.

Sadly, the Graveyard map couldn't be included in the final product as James didn't finish it in time.

Conclusion

Overall, my work over these weeks was slightly lacklustre, partly due to my own lack of effort, but also a lack of coordination and team participation. 

One thing I failed to implement was improving upon the options menu. I decided against doing this, as I felt as though the map lacked enough depth to need any options other than keybinds. What I didn't account for was that music would be added to the game, and that they should have options included to adjust the volume. If I were to update the game again, I would definitely add a volume slider.

Another thing I did not implement was a character selection screen, however this wasn't my fault as there only being one character in the final game, therefore having the screen would be redundant.

Despite this though, the update definitely improved the game in a few ways, such as the art Lawrence made for the menus, or the improved gameplay mechanics from Finlay.