Digital Prototype: Iteration 1

It has been two weeks since our last blog, but we made some huge progress! First of all: Our first digital prototype is ready and playable. You can go and test it here.

The main menu screen has 3 buttons, like in the final paper-prototype. The play,mute and highscore - buttons. Highscores are (for the moment) only stored on your local device, or per browser. The mute button disables all music and sound in the game.

Once the user selects play, there is no going back to the main menu. The pause button in-game has been switched to another mute button. We felt like a pause menu was superfluous. Because we want to test the controls of the game, the user gets a choice which type of controls he wants to use. The different controls we offer in this iteration are:

• Tapping the left half of the screen makes the dino go up, and tapping the right half makes it go down.
• Tapping the upper half of the screen makes the dino go up, and tapping the bottom half makes it go down.
• Tapping the left half of the screen makes the dino go down, and tapping the right half makes it go down.

In this first digital prototype the user has to choose his controls everytime he reboots the game after pressing the play button. We implemented it like this to make it convenient for our testers to try out all the different types of controls. This feature is furthermore only present in the Android version of the digital prototype, since the browser version uses the arrow keys on the keyboard as controls instead. In later iterations of the game the control selection will either be migrated to a settings screen, or be dropped entirely, depending on the feedback we collect from this first iteration.

Once the control scheme has been selected a tutorial screen pops up, this shows where you need to tap to move your dino. At the bottom it also shows you which obstacles you need to eat and which to dodge. Tapping once on the tutorial screen immediately starts the game.

The gameplay hasn'y changed a lot. Only a multiplier has been added. If you are on a good dino streak or survive long, it increases. If you miss a small dino you lose your streak, but you won't die. Hitting an obstacle however immediately kills you.

Below you can see video of the gameplay to clarify everything. Only the option to select the control scheme hasn't been included in the video yet, but you can see that in the screenshot below. Now our evaluation period begins and more updates will follow quickly. Stay classy and play dino top hat!!!

The controls selection screen