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[bdepst]

Windows and Mac builds here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-7ejLr2hiyLdSHISWdPEcWVsqZBKA_Wb/view?usp=sharing



Welcome to the devblog for the alpha version of our student team's Untitled Water Game. In our game, you play as a blob of water on a quest to restore the local, drying-up lake to its former glory. Players will solve puzzles and collect water droplets, transforming between solid, liquid, and gaseous states, and avoiding obstacles such as sink drains, absorbent plants, and even the heat of the sun. We have been steadily improving this game over the past few weeks, and will continue to do so in the coming weeks as well.


This Week's Changes

For this week’s version, we added two new levels to our game. One, the rainy day level, has been in development for a while, and simply has not been ready to be shown until now. The other level serves an interesting purpose when looking at the larger picture for our game, and also ties in closely with another change we made this week. This second level, the bathroom level, is less stressful than the previous levels we've made, instead focusing on exploring the bathroom to collect all the water droplets. We implemented a collectible system that allows the player to collect “water droplets” for two primary reasons. Firstly, because it gives the player another objective aside from just reaching the goal. It forces them to traverse locations that they usually would not bother with if they weren’t trying to collect all the water droplets. So, in that sense, it adds another layer to the experience, since our story so far is that the player wants to save the local lake. Secondly, this system is going to allow us to gatekeep the levels in later deliverables. We plan on implementing a system where you need to have collected a certain amount of water droplets over the course of what you’ve played so far in order to make more progress. As I mentioned earlier, this system connects to our second new level, which as of right now is less about puzzle solving/platforming and more about interacting with different items in the room to collect as many water droplets as possible. The water droplet system also provides a reason for why the player would want to enter each house in our hub world: the more water you end up collecting from each house, the more water you’ll ultimately end up bringing to the lake at the end of the game!



Next Steps

For the next iteration, we plan on implementing the gatekeeping system that I talked about earlier with the water droplets. This will provide an extra challenge since the player won’t be able to just brute force their way through the level to the goal; it will force them to take them time to traverse the levels more fully and collect more of the water droplets. This will also keep the story relatively linear, as even if players are able to do a couple levels out of order, they will need to collect a certain amount of water to progress to the next part of the story. The rainy day level also needs to be touched up, as it isn’t completely done yet, just presentable enough to display in the deliverable.

[bdepst]

Windows/Mac builds here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/10OYH8QTes-qTEXxvWfukgGRk_-DYyUcP/view?usp=sharing
New game title! "Be Water, My Friend"

This Week's Changes
For this week’s iteration, we tried our best to follow the advice that our instructors gave us regarding how to make our game more polished and professional. We made sure to add a lot of sound effects this week, and we fixed up the main menu so that it looks less crude than it has in previous iterations. Some other general aesthetic changes were made, such as new polished story art for the beginning of the game, new particles/models for the air conditioner and cooler, and cutscenes for the final level. Upon return to the hub world, the player will also now appear next to the level they previously completed, rather than being transported back to the start of the hub world. While this is a rather minor change, we felt that it was a small thing that could make the world of our game feel more cohesive and logical in terms of flow and layout. We did add one more level to the game, although it isn’t being included in the build for this deliverable. We found that it currently felt a little out of place, and plan on fixing it up for next week. However, just wanted to note that there is more completely fresh content in development.

   Gameplay wise, we made sure to implement the level progression system with the water droplets that we talked about last week. Now, you need to collect a certain number of water droplets in order to move onto the next level. This forces players to go back and explore the previous levels more thoroughly if they didn’t collect enough droplets their first time through. This system also makes sense with the narrative, since the whole point is that you want to collect enough water to fill up the lake at the end. The look of our liquid form of water had been criticized in the feedback in previous deliverables, and so we finally got around to making the liquid state look more like actual liquid. It adheres to the physics of liquid now, as well. This is an aesthetic change that hopefully makes the game appear more professional, but it also allowed us to spice up the gameplay a little bit as well. Apparently, this doesn't yet display correctly on Mac? That's something we'll fix for next week. We implemented a sort of health system that involves the new and improved form of liquid water. Basically, as you move the player around now in the liquid state, some water will spill over the sides of the kitchen objects and onto the floor. If you look in the top left corner, we have now given the player a certain amount of “health” that will decrease as more and more water spills onto the floor, down drains, etc. This adds a new, novel layer to our gameplay system and, hopefully, a bit of an extra challenge, adding a sort of "soft" movement limit that prevents the player from mindlessly jumping around and forcing them to think more carefully.


Next Steps
   For next week, we plan on fixing up the level that I mentioned earlier. We also hope to add in an “ending cutscene” of sorts to tie the story all together. The win canvas could also use a little polishing, as could the camera. Aside from these things that we know must be fixed for next time, we will also be paying close attention to the feedback that we receive this week.

[bdepst]

Welcome to the devblog for our gold release of Be Water, My Friend!
Find our itch.io link here: https://starguardians.itch.io/water
Or download from Indie DB:
https://www.indiedb.com/downloads/be-water-my-friend-windows-gold-release
https://www.indiedb.com/downloads/be-water-my-friend-mac-gold-release



This Week's Changes
Seeing as this week’s submission is the final one, our team focused mostly on tying up some loose ends that our game had. A significant thing that we knew we needed to have done in order for the game to go gold was the ending cutscene. This adds to the overall cohesiveness of the game; we have the intro drawings to draw the player in and get them absorbed in the world of the game, and then we have the exit cutscene that acts as a proper send off to the little story that we created. Another significant change that we had to be sure to make for this iteration had to do with the way the player character looked while in the water state on Mac builds. For last week’s deliverable, we ran into a last minute issue where the new and improved liquid state that we implemented didn’t show up properly on Mac standalone builds, even when it had worked in the editor. So, we kept the old state of liquid water for the Mac build and used the new one for Windows. This wasn’t a huge deal for the beta deliverable, and most people seem to be using Windows anyway, but we knew that this was something we had to get right for the final product, since it’s such a central part of our game. Thankfully, we were able to solve it for this week’s deliverable and get it working properly on both platforms. Additionally we added another whole new indoor level (the new Level 5), which was a much larger kitchen level involving puzzles and platforming. We wanted to add some more content to make the game last longer, and this new level acts as a good penultimate challenge before the final level, and gives the player more chances to collect water droplets (the level entry water requirements have been raised accordingly).



   Aside from those things, we mostly tried to follow the advice that the instructors gave us and polish up some other areas of our game. For instance, the second level (the first outdoor one) was kind of just a floating green plane previously, which admittedly looked pretty wacky and out of place. We added some terrain around it in order to give the illusion of it being a real outdoor environment. Similarly, our fourth level (the bathroom one) had been criticised for being simplistic and out of place. We added some puzzles and platforming to it in order to add a challenge and make it feel a little more consistent with our other levels. For the final level, we made it rainy to add to the atmosphere of facing this foe. We made other polish-related changes, such as adding an options menu which gives the player control over volume, quality settings, and even resolution and fullscreen mode. We received feedback about performance issues, so the ability to lower quality settings from the previous default of “Ultra” should definitely help, as well as the ability to change game resolution.  Of course, we also made actual in-game changes that should help with performance too. Besides performance, we also changed the camera, preventing it from “flipping” when the player looked straight down, and also keeping it in bounds at all times, instead of getting stuck in an awkward position behind a wall for example. We also took feedback related to issues such as getting stuck on the road models, and fixed the colliders accordingly. There were other small fixes too, such as improving lighting in certain scenes, labelling water requirements on the levels, or making certain models look more professional.



Final Words
Overall, we are very happy with the way our p3_gold deliverable turned out, and look forward to attending the game showcase! During development, there were definitely times where communication and time management could have been better, to prevent crunch periods and allow us to get more done each week, but in the end, we pulled through and are happy with the final product. The game has come a long way from its early stages to its final gold release, and we’re proud of the work that we put into it.