After a break of a month, it’s time for production to resume for the final 4 month. We’ve added 5 new team members to Phlegmatic Studios and are looking forward to working with them to improve our game as much as we can. We have a lot of ideas to discuss and decide upon and even more work to get done before the Senior Show in April.

There are a few key areas that we, as a team, have decided we need to focus on first. The highest priority of these being the control scheme. Throughout the first few months of production, we mainly used a “twin-stick” configuration for controls, with two virtual joysticks as the method of input on the device, but as testing and feedback have shown time and time again: this isn’t where we should be. Testers have found it lacking in many ways and desire something better. Our first task is to figure out what that “better” is and implement it as quickly and effectively as possible.

The next high priority area that we need to focus on is the aesthetic and theme of the world. As it stands right now, players are dropped in a pretty generic and empty feeling factory environment.

While it has worked for us up to this point, we have decided that we need to push it, either locking down on the factory setting by making the level more like an assembly line, or by taking it somewhere else entirely. The primary alternative idea, at the moment, it a Dr Sues feel, with comical looking machinery and strange devices whirling and buzzing around the level.

With these two primary points of focus in mind, we resume our work with new team members providing fresh and interesting new ideas that will take our project to new heights.