With our first play test completed and feedback received it was time to start fixing some of the issues and advancing upon the positives. 

First thing was first though, pitting our programmer against that main menu audio. This was accomplished simply by adding, drum roll please, a slider. Yes indeed, the humble slider.  Now our audio volume was up to our players discretion. Programmer: 1 - Audio: 0.  

With our spirits ignited from that first victory we set our eyes onto the next bug. Well, not so much a bug, more like player pathing and that was them accidentally finding themselves in the blue void, also known as Unity's default background when you run the game but there is indeed no level there. You know, this neat little thing: 

Turns out, this fun blue screen of nothingness also appears when your player simply walks out of the level. Now while that's common sense and nothing new to us what was new, was the fact that we forgot to put up some invisible walls. So up they went, and behold! No more escaping (*ahem*  leaving early) the carnival! 

Next up, was our rigged mechanic and this was one where we cycled through a few ideas, and wouldn't really reach its final stages until much later in our development. You see our plan, and it was quite the plan, was to simply warn the player beforehand! Yes, you read that correctly, warn them. Perhaps after exploring the environment, the player would come across an NPC who warns that the game is rigged so that the player would be prepared for such an unruly mechanic or perhaps the playable character's parent would warn the player; either way it was a marvellous solution and surely didn't have one giant glaring flaw, but we will get into how that went after testing phase two.... 

Now with all this bug squashing we didn't lose sight of some of the lovely comments we had received during play testing, and of course the opportunity it provided for exploration! One piece of feedback we had received was that the art was dreamlike or like that of a storybook. This was actually a far more perfect comment than our testers may have initially realised and it's actually to do with our narrative and the mechanic that accompanies a very specific moment. In Festival of the Lost, we have two sections of the narrative; the start where the player has their parent accompanying them and experiencing the carnival during the day where everything looks normal, and the second part where the parent is abducted and everything turns dark and scary for the child main character. When we had received the comment 'it's like something out of a storybook, dreamlike' we decided to really lean into that dream idea for the character designs, if the day time was the 'dream' then the night time would be the nightmare. This opened up character design opportunities and we were no longer limited by what was actually possible, and this was something we heavily leaned into over the course of our development. 

Speaking of our characters, we were thrilled to see how many people enjoyed talking to them as well as enjoyed their unique animation;  as though they were off doing their own thing helping to sell the environment as a place that the player was in rather than just a place around the player.  As a result we decided to populate the level even more than it already was, giving the player more exploration opportunity. For the time being however, we would just copy and paste our main character everywhere as a placeholder and so long as we update this to our new NPC's before our next test session shouldn't cause any confusion whatsoever... 

Remember those three light bulbs we talked about in our last dev log after one of our play testers excitedly ran off in search of secrets? Turns out those three light bulbs all had the same idea; we should add secrets! A few meetings later and we've now got a whole bunch of Easter Eggs ready to be thrown about the carnival like confetti and maybe a collectibe plushie or three along the way.

While it was fun and insightful responding to our feedback we weren't quite done there. Our circus still wasn't accessible and it needed to be by the time the next play test rolled around, because in there was our boss waiting to be developed, but before we could design what she looked like and what her animations were, we needed to work out her mechanics and just how exactly this boss fight would look like. After back to back discussions we settled on tradition, after all our game was pretty nostalgic in it's design. So why not have a three staged boss fight that utilised the dart mechanic that the player would already be introduced to and confident with? With our boss fight decided, it was time to get a placeholder in there and get the logic down. 

- FOTL Devs  🎈