This was the last week for the semester and an exciting one for the team. We had our final presentations on Monday, wrapped up the project to bring it in a state which is presentable for the festival and gearing up for the festival itself. It feels like the end but for our team it really isn’t. We also have a responsibility beyond the semester for presenting the game at the Games for Change festival in June.
Last minute corrections
We did make minor improvements to the game overall both from the client mobile application and the main game as well. From the client side, a major improvement was that the application now just shows one single bar for both High and Low pitches. Earlier since the bar used to climb up or down in steps depending on if the player is trying High or Low pitch. This often gave the players a notion that they were supposed to sing even higher or lower to get more input into the game. Since this wasn’t true and would potentially wear players out, a simple change helped a long way in communicating the idea from the user interface on the client.
From the main game, we did change a couple of sound pieces to make the overall theme consistent and have that emotional connection with the game especially the ending victory song. Also, we did another round of content pass to tweak the story for the game. The game now begins by painting a picture that Earth faced extinction due to some phenomena and now remaining survivors are trying to rebuild society. This acts as a premonition for the later Virus event in the game. This we feel in general makes the faint thread of a story our game has much more concrete. We also changed the animations for the closing were earlier the Human indicator used to fly up to destroy the Virus indicator. This has been modified to the human indicator stays intact but shoots a laser beam sort of effect which destroys the Virus. Another important change we made was making the choice that the players have in the free fight stage much more obvious with the panel flying in to the center of the screen and them moving to the right bottom corner of the screen.
Preparation for the Festival
Apart from the last minute changes, we have also published the new version of the app to the iOS and Android market and they should reflect in a week’s time on the market. We are also working out the logistics for having 6 of the team members available at the conference for presentation. Main part of the festival would be having a more formalized practice for MC on stage who will run the show. We have a 30 minute slot to run our game but since our game finishes in under 10 minutes we are looking into the possibility of doing a short presentation to cover a bit about the game. This would include the game design strategy, the challenges we faced during the course of development of the game itself and few other things. All the details for these would get finalized over the course of the next month while we prepare for the festival itself.
This was the last week for the semester and we all will be heading our own ways for the summer. The project has been archived and the build of the game is ready to be run anytime.
That’s it from this week and this project. Hope to see you at the Games for Change festival between June 17th to 19th in New York.
Mayank Grover