As we are getting close to the end of the semester, we're also getting closer to that final polish, and this week has been packed with some really fun stuff! We've been focusing heavily on player feedback and adding more substantial content to flesh out the gameplay experience even more. The maze level is finally here, and we think it brings a ton of new challenges to the table. There's still plenty of polish work ahead of us, but we're starting to see the game come together in a satisfying way. As this is our Beta due date, this is our (almost) fully feature complete game. From here on, everything will be polishing and prettying up. Here's what has been going on this week:

Gameplay:

• We've added our brand new maze level alongside a cool 3-ball puzzle that should give players a lot more to sink their teeth into! These additions significantly increase the gameplay time, though we might need to tune them down a bit since Level Up expects around 5 minutes of play time and we're probably overshooting that mark right now.
• Sound effects have been added to doors to give players nice tactile feedback when they do something right. It's amazing how much of a difference audio cues make in making actions feel impactful and rewarding. This was added since we heard directly multiple times that players never knew when they were doing something right, well, now you know!
• We've also implemented a very early and very bland tutorial dialogue system. It's definitely not pretty yet, but it's functional and gives us a foundation to build more comprehensive player guidance on top of.

• A new song has been added to the mix, and we've changed how music looping works so that it's now determined by which level you're in rather than just playing on repeat. This should feel a lot less boring than simply having two different songs alternating.
• We've changed the colour of the "required item" highlights to make them way more visible in stages and prevent them from clashing with the barrier colours. Players should have a much easier time identifying what they need to interact with now.
• We've really utilized the glass mechanic to make both the maze puzzle and ball puzzle more engaging, especially with the ability to go underground. It adds this whole new dimension (almost literally) to the puzzles that feels pretty unique and give you that "wow I really can go small and big" feeling.

Design:

• Moving through the house mechanic has been implemented to seamlessly take players to the next stage, which should make progression feel much more natural and immersive. Might need a bit more polish but expect that soon since polish is our top priority moving forward.
• Speaking of, we're still deep in polish mode, working on adding more dialogue for different sections to build out the lore, potentially adding more music tracks, and implementing shader cells to make the overall visual experience much nicer.
• Bug fixing continues to be an ongoing battle - camera and player clipping is still a known issue we're tackling, and highlighting for some objects still doesn't work properly. The usual polish grind, but we're making steady progress on all fronts.

As always though, feel free to download our latest build and test all of the new features out yourselves! Our latest build will be named Beta, and just in case, it will be attached to this devlog. We hope you enjoy!