Beta Launch

On April 20th, I released the Beta build of The Pazzi Conspiracy: An Educational Video game. Now people can play the game and fill out a feedback form to help me improve the user experience.

It is hard for me to remember exactly what I did from the time I made the UI updates to when I released Beta 1.0. I basically made the whole game playable in that time. Here's a non exhaustive list of what I remember doing, but honestly I worked on it for so long every day that things kind of run together in my memory:

• made sure each level was playable from start to finish
• determined which conversations should begin at the start of the scene and which should be started when the player interacts with a given NPC
• Made sure players could only progress when they completed the quest
  • programmed every quest and all of the subtasks they need to do; made sure the game understood when each task was completed 
  • gave players prompts to help with the quest if they tried to move on too soon
• programmed events to happen at key moments during conversations
  • NPCs enter and exit scenes on cue, characters in level 1 join your party when you find them, game objects are set to active/inactive
• loaded new scenes during conversations to seamlessly continue the story 
• made sure the HUD had everything the player needed
  • map that only lets you go to the appropriate locations (can't load the level 1 church from level 4, for example)
  • main menu button that destroys the player, canvas, etc. when clicked so you can get a new set of vital game objects at the start of each new level
• added a whole bunch of interactable NPCs with unique dialogue in the crowd scenes (piazzas and workshops)
• etc.

This seems like a short list, but with 5 levels and upwards of 20 individual scenes, each item in the list took hours to implement. I had to check to make sure everything worked across all of the relevant scenes. This was a long process of making small changes > inevitably getting something wrong > testing it out > realizing one part of the problem > making another change > and doing the cycle over again until there were no more issues. It was a super tedious experience, but it was rewarding all the same because in a very short period of time my game went from totally unplayable to playable. And now people are playing it! That's exciting!