I have a basic, but playable game that I’ve been working with for the past couple of weeks. Woohoo!

In getting it ready for some play testing sessions, I’ve been able to identify the initial shortcomings of my ideas. Here are some of the design changes I’ve made while putting it together:

• Gates changed to actual voting booths - The gates just weren’t doing it for me. It felt too arbitrary and I felt like it abstracted the whole thing too much. Voting booths relate it to the real world situation a little bit more, and at least I feel like these creeps have more of a purpose… to vote!
• “Shoving” creeps away from the booths - While I was initially testing the game, I felt like I was just watching them go into the booths and I needed some way for the player to interact more with the game. I decided to have the creeps be shoved away on click. This mechanic feels like it has the potential to be somewhat powerful… at this point, I have the creeps slowing down as they keep getting shoved. Not sure this is really doing anything though other than making it easier for the player to win. I may try it the opposite way… when a creep gets shoved, it moves faster. I need to work with this a bit more, but I think there’s something that can be valuable there, I’m just not sure what yet.
• Creep art - I realized that my creeps were looking pretty rough because Scratch does not like 24 bit PNGs… lame. So I tried both 8 bit PNGs and GIFs. This causes a problem though: I had a color touch test on the voting booth (when touching the grey vote button, hide the creep and increment the vote). These other formats leave a bit of a white/grey “halo” around the creeps and when they were touching each other; they were meeting the hit test. For now I changed the button color to blue but I need to think about what I want to do with it some more. I also created actual nice start and end screens… I’m pretty happy with those overall.
• Status bar - I added a status bar for voting. I’ll discuss this more in my next post about playtesting, but it needs some work. The problem I’m having right now is figuring out a way to display the vote variable from the bar sprites (using think or say).

This week, I’m planning on getting my documentation and paper written (started but really slacking off on the written part of my project). Yikes! Lots to do…