Blog

With Final week around the corner, Ako has been adding final fixes and most importantly, an ending to our experience. These fixes include: More dynamic way of tracking cards when drawing. Works without breaking the game even if some untracked cards are added later in the game. Festive SFX for the happy scene. A concluding…
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Last week was softs and we had players playtesting our experience. We were able to identify various places where people had trouble with the experience. This week’s goal is to fix those problems. Some Last Minute Fixes Shorter Tutorial We got a common feedback before feedback that the tutorial is a wee bit long and…
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We still had one important feature to add to our experience – touch interactions with Ako! Often during playtesting and demos, we noticed that players want to touch and watch Ako respond. This required the use of Leap Motion Controller to track hands. Which Interactions to Implement? We initially came up with a list of…
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With our Hint system implemented, we wanted to find out how players would respond to having hints in the experience and what they thought about it. Lesson 1: Ako always Listens – Not great! Ako is constantly waiting for the players to talk so that he can help them. However, if he doesn’t understand what…
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Until now, we were waiting to finalize the states that our experience would consist of. This would determine the main dialog that Ako would have to speak. We also wanted to add some more visual cues, especially during the real game to help the player get unstuck. Setting up the Project on New Machine Until…
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We had made good progress until halves and achieved our goal of putting the entire pipeline together and testing them out. We also got a lot of good feedback and advise from our playtesters during the Halves demo. Schedule for next weeks We went through our list of features we wanted to implement and made…
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Team Ako has been out of school last two weeks for spring break and GDC. Before that we also had our halves presentation during Week 7. We had playthroughs with EA guests and they provided us with some feedback too. We also attended GDC and got to listen to a couple of talks that were…
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We are at Week 7 and halves is just around the corner! As planned, we proceeded with integrating the AR and Speech modules. However, we had some major decision changes regarding the state machine in Unity. Choosing Dialogflow functions While Dialogflow sounded like a good option for us to use to drive the state machine…
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The next few weeks for our team is going to involve merging all our current work. Over the past weeks, we had finalized on our tech and art designs. Everyone in our team had been working on their bit separately till now. Making Ako interesting We had decided that Ako would be having a personality…
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Last week was our Quarters Open House and we had few people from Electronic Arts come in and play with our prototype. We also finalized on the various platforms and tools we will be using for our project from now on. Another major decision was finalizing our character design and voice that would go with…
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