Development Devlog

Team: An, Crystal, Yibo, Lia

Started with brainstorming, our group decided to go with the concept of ocean and beach, and finally we end up with the idea of the life of a hermit crab. Then, each of us did some research on the habit of hermit crabs, and we shared and finalized our ideas in our meetings. Basically, we want to share the message of how artificial “shells” (plastic debris) thrown by human is causing the death of these hermit crabs, and we want this game to mimic the life of a hermit crab.

After we had our basic direction, we split work. An and Lia took charge of the UI and game code, and Yibo and I started with the modeling. But we all kind of working together and helping each other out in the process. Our time line and workflow is shown in the images below.

Game Flowchart

Below is the our strategy of designing the game. We calculated the walking speed of the hermit crab, and we drew circles with fixed distance around the hermit crab's starting point. Then we planned different numbers of fishes and shells for each circles, to make the game harder and harder as the player go further. 

Playtesting Feedback

 1.Healthbar and life of shell do not show clear enough in the background. 

2.The change of the health is not obvious enough as the game proceed.

3.How is the game depicting our concept? If we are telling the story of plastic pollution leading death of hermit crab, then we need to have some elements to show that.

4. Both the health bar and shell bar are dropping too fast. The play might be confused at the beginning of the game but do not have enough time to figure it out.