Grandma Force Alpha Test

Description

As a Grandma Force operative, your job is to go into unhappy town and happify all the sad babies with your cookie launcher!

You start with 35 seconds and must pacify all babies before the timer hits 0! Every babu you happify earns you two more seconds on your objective!

The game was developed by the following:

• Chaz Acheronti - Programmer
• Chris Dal Porto - Tile Sprite Artist (Grass, Cement, Roads)
• Jasmine Zamora - Baby and Grandma Animator
• Ki Sung Park - Object Artist (Fire Hydrant, Trash Can)

The game was developed using Tiled, Tiled2Unity, Unity3D, and FL Studio.

Controls

WASD / DPAD --> MOVEMENT

SPACEBAR / TRIGGER --> FIRE COOKIE

Q, E, K / LEFT TRIGGER --> AIM

Alpha Testing

The Alpha test during May 2, 2018 went good for the content that was available to them.

Testers were given SNES pads and tasked with happifying all the babies. During the test day, we got 5 testers to fill the shoes of grandma.

There were several problem areas that came up during testing:

• Players kept getting stuck in trees and trash cans
• Trash cans were not visible when placed on top of cement (similar color grey)
• Players had difficulty finding all babies
• Locations are not diverse enough and look very similar, making it difficult for the player to remember where they are

Problems areas that I see personally include:

• Lack of juiciness (no screen shake or visual satisfaction from shooting cookies at babies)
• No easy way to remember where babies are
• No scoreboard

To fix problems that came up during testing, I can think of several solutions

• Diversify the streets with house sprites, jungle gyms, or cars
• Provide a rotating arrow indicator to closest baby when the grandma is too far away from a target
  • then turn it off when they are within a certain range so they have to look
• Round the grandma's Collider instead of a Box2d so they can round corners
• Darken the color of the trash can
• Add camera shake on baby hit
• Add a final scoreboard that uses initials

Another suggestion made by Chris was to add a camera transition that shows the final babies if they are below a certain number, to add insult to the player when they only had say 1 of 50 babies left when they lost.