Fury Void is in the last stretch. Team Fury has collected the last set of feature suggestions, has butchered the asset and issue archives, and is plowing through the last few weeks of Fury Void’s development.
Firstly, all items that are being fixed or added to Fury Void is logged on the Trello board, a free program that allows teams to collaborate on lists of cards - Trello is superb for Scrum or Kanban boards. There are a plethora of items spread among a series of lists: Public Notices; Feature (tweaks) Left; Bugs for this Week; This Week’s Finished Bugs; Bugs for Next Week; Bugs for the Third Week; New Bug Reports; and, Not Going to Make It.
From every board sacrifices have been made and fed to the Not Going to Make It list. Team Fury had to objectively handle the very few remaining weeks in development. All items that were pre-prioritized as ‘low’ were taken to the NGtMI list along with a vast number of feature-tweak suggestions and ‘medium’ priority bug fixes. Despite removing dozens of items from what is going to be worked on, there is still plenty of work to do; if this was a truly professional operation, this time would be ‘crunch’ time.
Some important issues were corrected in the past few weeks. To start, music is played in all situations. The problem was that any tune for saving the galaxy was not playing, either being completely absent in-game, or at a very reduced volume on all screens but the Main Menu. Creating an object that was not destroyed on a Unity scene’s load and placing it in the same place within each scene corrected this issue.
Similar to the previous item was the issue of not having consistent sounds being played to give the player auditory feedback. It required a slog of testing each interactive object and adding the applicable sound effect script, but all things that the player may work with playback sound cues.
Another issue was that the game was not considering a new player launching the game without save data. On the New Game screen, if a player decided to select a save slot to start a new game, a warning would appear saying that save data may be overridden; this proved to be very confusing and unintuitive for new players during testing. Fixing this item lies in creating a check to see if the selected save slot has any points; if it does, warnings about overwriting save data will appear, and otherwise takes the player to the ship customization menu.
During a group testing session, it was deduced that one of the weapons was too loud in firing. Simply fixed, audio levels were brought down. However, at this point, the levels may be too low, though this consideration needs further testing.
Next, a number of minor features and tweaks were done on the game. Fury Void enemies now appear on the minimap, following the path of enemies spawned and being destroyed in-kind. Enemy weapons now appear clearer on screen when fired, and will not take the player’s health into a negative range.
How much damage enemies, collisions, and explosions do to the player has also been augmented. Difficulty options are no-longer placed under Options, but are located on the ship customization screen and saved to player profiles.
Control options have also been moved to the customization screen. Speaking of which, an issue was occurring when paused in-game; the player could still animate the ship aiming when using the XBox controls. Minor code changes were required, and the issue is now resolved. Further control tweaks involve the access of any axis on the XBox control, as per playtester request.
All options selected when on a menu are highlighted if selected; they are darkened if not or not available. The only location that this feature is not present in is the menu presented during a pause, but it is planned to be fixed shortly.
A major feature - not a tweak - was the addition of an ‘Optimal Salvation Bar’. This item appears on screen, decreasing whenever a planet, sun, moon, or enemy is destroyed. Based on this, a score modifier is applied, with decreasing results occurring when ‘Optimal’ levels have been reached. The Bar is something that was brought-up during a recent test session; it gives a partial context to the game, while also providing an indicator of when the player should exit the play-space.
To exit the play-space, a minimap object has been added to indicate where the player may go to warp to another system. Between systems, the player is shown their score from the previous system. Further, the player can edit their controls, difficulty, weapons, and ship.
There are a number of other minor feature tweaks and bug features, but a point to be addressed would be the issue of team drive. Team Fury is hitting the ‘point’ witnessed in other game project teams in the past, that being the time when even sports players want to just glide into the finish. The trick is to sprint through the goalline, so motivation and drive are a major contention for the Scrum Master/Product Owner, and the Project Manager. The biggest test Fury Void will be facing in the next few weeks would be keeping the pace that the 4-man team has had so far.
Team Fury has been doing stupendously. Even if the game was to stop development now, it would be a presentable product. If work is done, and the schedule kept even 80% accurately, Fury Void is well on its way to wrapping-up an explosive player experience.
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