February 2022

Over the past couple of weeks I have been improving many aspects of the game to make playtesting a much more user friendly experience. I have made all the sounds be generated using MetaSounds which is a feature of Unreal Engine 5 currently in Alpha development. This enables the sounds to be edited on the fly and then change during the tutorial segments. This alongside the spatialisation of the walls being set pre object creation means that level editing and tweaking is much simpler and more accessible to myself as tweaks are required through the Co-Design process.

I have also added an alternative control scheme which allows the left and right strafe functions to instead be turning buttons which mimics the style of doom or older games on computer before mouse and keyboard were the common control scheme. This allows sounds in front and behind the user to be more easily spatialised rather than just those which exist directly to the left or right. Testing both these methods of control will be interesting to see if users can distinguish them, and if so which they prefer to use.

Now my focus will be on making this experience as glitch free as possible before initial user testing, alongside making the sounds as distinguishable from one another as possible while appropriately representing their physical purpose.