Hey all! Another update from the Reflection Team,

This is a bit late but this is to cover what we've been doing so far and what to expect on Thursday, April 21st, 2022 - the launch of our game!

It'll be tight but here's what we're aiming for

• Background music for the game
• Some more collectibles for the player
• More interactables for the player
• An ending
• All the voice lines done

From last week, the majority of our refinements have been made. This was done in waves of tweaking the gameplay, narrative, puzzles, and game features to make the overall gameplay more what we wanted to have. Let's talk about these in a bit more detail.

Gameplay

The majority of our game was released for the Beta Release. That is, all of our features were there (as rough as they were) to give the player the ability to play around with them and offer us feedback. Since then we've been polishing these features as such,

• The UI has been significantly touched up - new icons and a more minimalist design. However, keeping as much information that is useful to the player as possible. The journal was polished to paginate better, and the objectives (which we completed in code but couldn't make a UI for) have been given their deserved UI corner.
• Interactables have their object highlighting tweaked to be the most contrasting of any component a player will see in-game.
• Mechanical changes to finicky things like the Empty Bucket to make using it easier.

Puzzles

From the Alpha, I've been getting as many of my friends to test out the games and changed up things as we went along. All this testing has given me conscious and unconscious feedback on our puzzle layouts.

• Got rid of a canvas in the second half of Dad's Closet puzzles. Most players testing out the game always spent most of their time on one puzzle that was way too hard for what it was. We've got rid of this bottle-neck to make the puzzle streamlined to really make this puzzle feel like a 'Level 2' puzzle instead of a 'Level 3' puzzle
• Each puzzle has been given context clues and dialogue to help out with the puzzle aspect of it

Narrative

The narrative is something that we wanted to ensure was polished and made sense, hence how late this was pushed. 

• Subtitles should be an option soon, to shine a light on our narrative, thanks to Jade
• We've implemented almost all dialogue of Millie, courtesy of our very own Briana Lee of UofT Music
• We've gotten back audio for David, thanks to Arohan Dutta of UofT Engineering
• We're anticipating the audio for Constance, thanks to Emma Westecott, the OCAD Instructor of this course.

Thank you for following the development of Reflection,

-Zuhab