What we did:
As we come closer to soft opening, this week, we spent most of our time merging every features, playtesting, and fixing bugs. Through multiple playtests we did recently, we got many great feedback on how to improve our UI and UX flow. Haley worked on tweaking UI and exporting new assets. John worked with her to update in-game UI so that people won’t get lost while playing. Ojas and Emily worked on debugging the whole app flow and our online database problems. Now, in one app, both “Play” and “Create” mode works. In “Create” mode, users can build their own maps with all kinds of art assets and save it or publish it online so that others can try out their maps. In “Play” mode, users can browse through all maps created by others and try to beat the high scores.
During this week, John also prioritized all the things we want to teach the users in tutorial system based on the playtest results. Haley created a detailed game flow diagrams and slides for everyone in the team to stay on the same page.
The challenges we encountered:
After we implemented the leaderboard system and map sharing system, programmers faced an issue that it took a long time for the tablet to pull that maps data online and display on the tablet in our current database framework. Ojas and Emily spent quite a while changing the framework to resolve this issue.
This week we had another small playtest with a few EA employees, and we found out some flaws in our app flow. This is the great thing about bringing in naive and fresh-eye testers to try our game, because we’ve been using the app for so long that a lot of time we miss some obvious problems.
Plans for next week:
Soft opening will be held on next Tuesday!! We will demo our game at the EA main lobby and get more people to try out our game! After that we will work on the feedback we get from Softs and at the same time start to implement progression system and tutorials!
