BarrelEye has had an exciting week! In the past seven days we cleaned up our build, had a demo for the members of the OCCO, and gave our mid-semester presentation where our game was available for the public to play. We received lots of positive feedback at these demonstrations. It’s clear that our work isn’t done, but we’re on the right track and it gave us a renewed enthusiasm to finish our project!
We have to be honest – most of our weekend and the first few days of our week were spent on fixing bugs, tracking down memory leaks and stabilizing the smart TV build for our Wednesday demo. Although the game had been playable for a while, we had ignored some details that started to add up, and were causing problems when exiting the game or hitting it with lots of network traffic. On Tuesday we had a code review with some members of the OCCO, and they helped us work through a couple of our trickiest technical challenges. We’re grateful that our client is willing to work so closely with us!
The work stabilizing the build was definitely worth it, because we seem to have caught all the memory issues in our build and it’s now very reliable. This gives us a rock-solid foundation to build on over the next few weeks while we finish content. It also paid off during our demos this week when we were able to easily let our game run for a long time, or restart cleanly during demonstrations.
When we showed our game to the OCCO on Wednesday, it marked our first demo using the actual smart TV hardware. We were a nervous for several reasons: We were unable to show the boss fight on the TV at this point, we knew that our lighting system was slowing our framerate, and we were immediately aware of all the other issues in our game. We were pleased with the positive reception. Our client felt that we were taking the game in the right direction and that we would be able to meet our goal. They also discussed the game’s biggest problems with us, and we concluded that we are having trouble communicating the game’s goal to our players. We are therefore going to give that topic our focus over the next few weeks.
The rest of our time this week was spent preparing for our mid-semester presentation, which went very well. In particular, the public demo we held afterwards was a great opportunity to talk about the work we’ve done over the past ten weeks and get a wide range of opinions on our work. Guests were very curious about the technology we’re using and the challenges we’ve encountered given our unique platform.
This weekend we will take a much-needed break before we return to a very busy schedule. We learned this week that we need to submit our game for approval by November 20th in order to show it at CES, which takes about a week off of our original schedule. That means the next two weeks are going to be intense, with big changes coming to the game every few days. We’ll keep you updated!
