During the spring break, I had a playtest feedback meeting with the TD and TA. The main purpose of this meeting was to re-evaluate the project priorities based on the testing feedback. At that point, the project had already entered the later stage of the Vertical Slice, so we could no longer keep pushing every idea from the GDD. Instead, we needed to decide which problems would directly affect the player experience, and which features could be temporarily set aside.

In this meeting, the team first discussed the feature scope. For the combat system and sprint function, we eventually decided not to add them for the current version. The reason was that the current demo was relatively small in scale, and the core experience was more focused on exploration, NPC interaction, and environmental atmosphere, rather than combat or fast movement. If we continued adding combat or sprint, it would create extra development, animation, balancing, and testing costs, but it might not clearly improve the core experience of the current Vertical Slice. Because of this, the team chose to focus on the stability and readability of the existing content instead.

Map stability became a higher-priority issue. During testing, players were able to clip through walls, fall out of the map, and pass through areas such as the tiger and the river. These kinds of bugs directly break the player experience, so the team decided to fix them through invisible walls, colliders, and necessary pop-up prompts. For me, this was also a very typical production decision: in a showcase build, basic playability and keeping the player immersed are more important than adding new features.

The meeting also covered UI and interaction feedback. For example, the raspberry count and map icons overlapped, which made the information unclear. The backpack also needed an ESC key close function, while still keeping the existing click-outside-to-close logic. These issues may not look like major mechanics, but they directly affect whether players can understand the system and complete actions smoothly. Because of this, the team treated them as important tasks during the polish stage.

This meeting also connected closely to my later audio / Wwise work. During the discussion, we mentioned that the backpack closing interaction could be supported by sound effects. The opening sequence was also planned to include a “headphones recommended” message to support the 3D spatial audio experience. This made me realise that audio was no longer just a final decorative layer. It was part of the polish that players could actually feel. UI sounds, ambience, and spatial audio could all help players understand actions, space, and atmosphere.

In terms of development strategy, the team decided to put around 60%-70% of the effort into polishing the first level in depth, while letting the asset production for the second level continue in parallel. The second level would reuse as many forest assets from the first level as possible, and also use the existing cabin model resources instead of creating everything from scratch. This reflected scope control in Vertical Slice production: we needed to prioritise the completion quality of the core showcase area, rather than pushing all content forward evenly.

This meeting helped me understand more clearly that Vertical Slice production is not about implementing everything from the design document. It is about deciding what can best support the final showcase within a limited timeframe. For my own work, this also explains why I later focused more on testable and perceivable feedback systems, such as UI audio, ambience, footsteps, and spatial audio. Compared with larger systems, these were easier to implement within a short time, and easier to validate during playtests.

If I were to do this project again, I would turn playtest feedback into a clear priority list much earlier, separating issues into must-fix, should-fix, and stretch goals. This would help the team decide earlier which content needed to serve the Vertical Slice, and which content should be pushed back to a later stage.