We have been hard at work this reading week!

Obstacles/Challenges

1.  How to highlight the beat where player has to do action while keeping the flow of the music?
2. Deciding and implementing a way to let player know the actions coming up without being intrusive to the game.

Feedback

• Loading in platforms as you go looks not as appealing as loading all platforms at once.
  

• Having more visual indicators for the rhythm is gonna be really helpful. (beat counter, UI element or visual effects, the environment or screen pulsing slightly)

• Visual consistency: The lives UI shows CAT x LIVES but the collectibles are just FISH NUMBER. (without the “x”)

• On the end screen, indicate how many possible fish treats player can collect for player replayability.
  

• Not entirely sure if the objective is to move to the beat or to collect all fish, the connection seems minimal. 

• There seems to be a fish underneath a platform near the middle of the level.
  

Changes

• Updates to the Score:
  • We now have a Music Score! It’s displayed on the top left with a music note icon, and it’s based on how “on-the-beat” the player’s jumps are. 
  • The final score that the player sees at the end screen is now the music score multiplied by the number of fish treats that were collected.

• Loading platforms at the start of the level:
  • In our previous implementation, platforms would load as you go. But from the feedback we were given, that did not look or feel good: it gave the impression that the game had performance issues.
  • Therefore, now all the platforms are already loaded and visible at the start of the level.
• Rhythm Indicators: In our last build, we’ve introduced visual feedback for the player that tells them how “on-the-beat” they were on each jump. Below are our updates for this feature:
  • Display Rhythm Indicators on Controller: The feature was previously only for mouse and keyboard, and now we’ve implemented it for controllers as well.
  • Changed “Perfect” to “Purr-fect”: This was a very popular comment during the playtesting! We can’t believe we didn’t have that from the start.
• Lower volume of Sound Effects: 
  • A common piece of feedback was that the sound effects are loud and they interfere with the rhythm of the music. We’ve lowered the default volume of the sound effects as a whole.
  • We also lowered the volume of footsteps (even more so than the other sound effects), since a lot of people were saying that the footsteps in particular were loud and interfering with the rhythm. 
• Fish Treat Collectibles UI:
  • We Added an “X” in the fish count (eg. 🐟 x 5) to be consistent with the lives UI. This was based on feedback we got, we made this change to make the UI more consistent.
• Display the total fish treat count:
  • In the end screen, we added the total count of fish treats that the player could have collected. This feature was also suggested to us in the Alpha build presentation.
• Make Fish Treats bounce on the beat:
  • The fish treat collectibles now bounce on the beat of the music. This detail was also suggested to us by the playtester, in order to add more game juice and make the game feel like it’s all on the beat.
• Bug Fixes and Polishing:  🐞🖌️
  • Checkpoint sound was not playing when the player picked it up, so we fixed that.
  • We have a 5 second delay at the start, and players were able to make the music start quicker by pausing and unpausing.
  • Fixed bug where the player rhythm indicators were showing and updating when in the pause menu
  • Remove fish under a platform: there was a random unreachable fish treat under one of our platforms, we have removed it.