Worked on new character design. Texturing + Animation
Made & implemented new art assets for the level
Created feedback UI
Made feedback VFX
Prepared for the halves presentation
DESIGN
This week I worked with Akshay and Kshitij to integrate art and new puzzles into our halves build. I’m cautiously optimistic about our halves performance and am looking forward to hearing the faculty’s feedback. During the ETC playtest day, we got so much great feedback from the kids that came to play. The findings from this playtest are the thing informing the design for this coming week. I’m really excited to improve the game based on this feedback and playtest again! We are hoping to have two playtests at Trinity next week which makes me tired just thinking about but also excited to get more feedback.
Middle school kids enjoying our game at ETC Playtest Day.
PROGRAMMING
Imported new character model and got animations working for running and jumping
Changed heating and cooling effects to use particle systems instead of sprite sheets
Added the character ability animation
Added cave art assets, changed the level geometry to the new assets
Changed gas flow logic to use the new discrete system. Also, gas can now flow into empty containers and change color according to the container. This should open up some possibilities for some new puzzles
Added some constraints to the zoom functionality. Still need to add positional zoom
Added feedback for when a container is doing work
Got gameplay demo ready for presentation at halves
PRODUCTION
Majority of this week was spent preparing for our presentation. Despite being out of town, I was able to create and iterate on the slides without too much hassle, and found that my productivity actually increased being physically away. We still had Scrum over the phone and kept each other updated through the online group chat. On Thursday night and Friday morning, we rehearsed for halves with the new art and design in the most up-to-date build. I am happy with our halves presentation and aware that we still have a long way to go, so keeping everyone enthusiastic about the game will be important. I feel quite excited about the project, and energised to keep working on it. I am really grateful to my team for being such superstars, covering for me, keeping communication open, and working with me when I was away, making remote production go more smoothly than I had anticipated. They are the best! On Saturday, we had ETC Playtest Day with 12 groups of kids throughout the day, which presented us with lots of useful feedback. Straight after playtest day, we met as a team and defined some tasks for next week as we head into our iteration, playtesting, polish and assessment phase and main development comes to a close.
At ETC Playtest Day, we had generally positive reactions to the game, with lots of useful feedback for iterations post-halves.
Our second playtest, at Trinity High School, the start of a semester-long partnership.
ART
Worked on level art assets & UI elements
Collected valuable feedback from the second playtest at Trinity High School
DESIGN
This week I finished building a prototype level for use at our second playtest at Trinity High School. I also worked closely with Akshay and Kshitij to make a system for giving players feedback on the pressure, temperature, and volume values of the gas inside our cylinders. How well this feedback system conveyed these values to players was what we were testing for this past Friday. We found that 100% of users could correctly identify the temperature feedback, 33% could correctly identify the pressure feedback, and 0% of testers correctly identify the volume feedback. My focus this week will be to build out most of the puzzles that will appear in the final product and continue to work with Kshitij and Akshay on getting the feedback for thermal variables as clear as humanly possible. This feedback is key to this project’s success as the gas laws are in essence a description of how pressure, temperature, and volume are related to each other in gas systems. Thus, students need to be able to clearly see how these variables are related and to do that good feedback is required. On the teacher outreach front I’ve been visiting many schools and learning about how they teach and how they incorporate technology into their classrooms. My skills as an orator and background in advertising have served me very well in these meetings as I have gotten most of the teachers/administrators very excited about the project. What is really needed now is cultivate the relationships we’ve made with teachers who we aren’t partnering with so that they can assume and advisory role on this project. This will allow us to continually gain insights into pedagogy, how games are used in the classroom, and how educational software is bought in a school setting.
PROGRAMMING
Implemented a new camera waypoint system that allows Julian to create zones where the camera automatically zooms in and out to focus on puzzle sections.
Added functionality for the player to zoom in and out
Background size and different elements also scale with the camera
Re-programmed the core system to use discrete values rather than continuous values.
This required syncing the values of P, V or T based on the gas law being taught – Hopefully this symmetry will make the relationships between these quantities easier to understand for the player.
Re-programmed the UI to reflect these states of the system
Added a volume indicator which shows the volume level of the system
Changed jump button to a sprite
An early game screenshot, with initial UI.
PRODUCTION
This week on the production end we had the last of our teacher outreach meetings at Avonworth Middle School. It has been interesting getting to meet different educators and school administrators and definitely a learning experience trying to decide how to proceed with partnerships and at what level. Julian is doing a great job at these meetings, and I feel we are getting better the more we meet with teachers. On Friday we had our second playtest, held by Julian and Kshitij at Trinity High School. Mr. Botzer has been extremely supportive and a large part of the design and development process so far, so we hope to keep him on board. As for me, remote production for this next week will be a challenge, but our pipeline and production practices have certainly settled down since the first few weeks and I am confident in the team’s ability to adapt to changes in plans and other unforeseen circumstances. I’m especially proud of my team this week, because it feels like everyone continues to be enthusiastic about the project and working well together. I couldn’t ask for a better team and I am so grateful for their support. I know I can trust each person to step up and do great work, not only in their individual disciplines but also to help out where the team needs it the most.
One of many interesting meetings with project instructor Scott Stevens.
ART
Worked on Cinema 4D to get the desired Art style
Created UI elements for Feedback
Collected valuable feedback from the first playtest at Trinity High School
DESIGN
This week, we ventured out to Trinity High School to conduct the very first playtest of the game with students. We gained several important insights which we used to iterate on the puzzle design. We’ve also had a meeting with Montour Middle School where we secured another partner classroom with another possible meeting on the high school level. I grossly underestimated how much time the teacher outreach portion of this project would take. These two trips took up about a day and a half of my time. Because of this, my progress on building puzzles has been slowed. I feel a bit frustrated by this but I don’t think it’s anything a few all nighters in the coming week can’t fix. I’m currently in the process of building several puzzles that will be playtested for engagement and learning efficacy this coming Friday and Trinity. I have to keep an eye on evaluation for this Friday’s playtest. My current plan involves asking conceptual questions using diagrams that are based on puzzles they solved during gameplay. My morale is fair as I’m happy with what we’ve made so far but know what a long road we have ahead of us. I’m worried that the level design is taking longer than it should. I feel like I either need to work harder or smarter. I’m not sure which is more feasible yet.
PROGRAMMING
This week I focussed on getting the game ready for our playtest at Trinity school. I changed the controls to use a virtual joystick instead of the left/right buttons, which definitely made the game easier to play. I also added the cooling ability and got it working across the system, so that different components like gases, pistons, etc all respond to the decrease in temperature and pressure. This required a change in the way that pistons work, but I believe the new design is cleaner. I also implemented a new mechanic – “doors” that respond to temperature and pressure. In keeping the design consistent, every gas can be connected to “n” doors (as many as needed by Julian), and so I have continued to keep the system modular and expandable. This week I will be adding features to our existing tools to help Julian build out his levels, as well as tweaking things like camera zooming and controls to get our game feeling right.
PRODUCTION
Sprint planning this week had to be adjusted for our progress last week, so we were focusing on Charles’ Law Island for the second week in a row. Given our progress this week and our additional insights into the realities of playtesting and assessment in schools, I think we need to scope down to only make Charles’ Law Island. I hope the rest of the team is still feeling motivated to finish this and I will strive to keep everyone’s morale up. Julian had a great idea to start writing down things we are noticing about developing transformational games as we probably won’t remember them at the end of the semester, so we now have a giant sticky note for that purpose up in our room. We had our first playtest at Trinity High School and our first meeting with Montour Middle School this week, which were both eye-opening experiences. It is striking to me how different schools can have vastly contrasting attitudes towards technology in the classroom, and it will be an interesting challenge to see how our game fits in with different kinds of teachers and administrative staff. I continue to reach out to more schools and develop our relationships with them. This week, we will playtest again with Trinity, this time focusing on the puzzles. We will also have our first meeting with Avonworth Middle School. As we work towards halves, I am concerned that we did not get as much done as we had hoped, but confident that our product will have the key components we promised, even though we have to scope down.
Made first pass for the character & its animations
Worked on art assets for the Puzzle
Explored how to implement in-game feedback VFX
Kshitij’s character model.
DESIGN
This week, I started building levels in earnest. I tuned the jumping so that the game was more playable and worked with Akshay to get our movement controls more usable. I designed and built the base level geometry for Charles’s Law island and put in the Charles’ Law jump puzzle. Cheryl-Jean and I also drove down to Washington, PA to visit the Trinity School. We were very pleased with their level of excitement about the project. They were very cooperative and offered many opportunities for us to test with their students. This turn of events has caused Cheryl-Jean and I to fast track the design of our evaluation methods. This week I was frustrated with the amount of time I had to spend on non-project work. I feel like Charles’ Law island could be farther along. Next week I’m looking forward to getting a lot of different physics puzzles into the level and begin polishing the gameplay. I also hope to work with Akshay to get our version control working for Macs. This will allow us to build to the iPads more quickly as well as allow me to work on the project from my laptop.
PROGRAMMING (Akshay)
Implemented heating character ability
Added Kshitij’s art assets into the game – container, cylinder, piston, connector, gate, etc and got them working with the existing code.
Tweaked our particles to look better and similar to Kshitij’s concept art
Handed off physics tools to Julian, so he can drag and drop the prefabs into the scene and they’ll work as intended
Created our first physics puzzle, the piston jump puzzle with these tools
I’ve been using JIRA every day, creating and managing my tasks so we can all be on the same page in terms of organization.
Had our first build day (to test the first Charles Island level) and hopefully received some helpful feedback from everyone.
PRODUCTION
On Monday, we had our first retrospective and began to nail down sprint planning. Retrospective gave us a good insight into what we struggled with in the past weeks, and I am working towards solving these problems throughout the semester. Organisation has proved more important than we previously planned. Sprint planning gave us concrete goals for up until quarters, and I tried a new method of doing this using the whiteboard to list and break down stories into tasks. Team buy-in has definitely been a challenge with using JIRA, but I continue to try and show its effectiveness at keeping us all on the same page. With Akshay’s build meetings, I hope the team is better able to see our progress more concretely. The biggest success this week for me was the teacher meeting with Trinity High School, which was very productive. Our school contacts there are very excited about the game and have provided us with numerous insights about using technology in the classroom, evaluating students, facilitating discussion and even provided lesson plans. It is fortunate that we have found experts who are engaged and enthusiastic about the work we do. I hope to foster this partnership and playtest regularly at their school.
This week, things have become more concrete. My focus has shifted from designing mechanics to creating actual level geometry and testing. I’m having to brush up on level design process so that I can create levels that meet learning goals in a timely manner. The feedback for interacting with thermal systems have to be stressed this coming week. Next week I want to meet regularly with Kshitij to get feedback designed and give art passes on levels I’ve designed. I’m happy we have a plan and I want to make sure everyone is communicating and using the organizational structures Cheryl-Jean has set up. We sometimes ignore organization and it is to our own detriment.
Displaying our design goals for the game as a whole and design sketches for level elements.
PROGRAMMING
Deployed our platformer prototype on the iPad 3 and 4
Handed off some level building elements to Julian so he can mock up some levels
Tweaked controls for the mobile device
Worked on some basic jump control, camera follow, tiling and parallex effects for the art layers
Constrained the physics system to 2 containers for now, will work on gas splitting later
PRODUCTION
We spent a lot of time this week preparing for quarters, and a large part of that for me was trying to get communication going so that the prototypes could be built in time, as well as working on the slides and practising. We had some underlying production issues that came to the surface, as we hadn’t been communicating much and we had been neglecting daily meetings due to our busy schedules. So, we had a full team “intervention” meeting on Wednesday where we each voiced our concerns and got back on track with standups, goals and tasks. It looks like next week, I need to hold a workshop for teammates to better understand JIRA. Some changes that came out of that meeting include a mid-week full team update meeting, a deeper commitment to daily meetings/project management and a build day (Thursday) and build meeting (Friday) for Akshay. I have learned that too little structure for this team can be a recipe for disaster. During quarters, we got a lot of useful feedback, mostly centred around getting the look of the game to match our design goals. I will be typing out this feedback for the team and we’ll be acting on it next week. I am also still in conversations with schools and have set up a meeting with Trinity High School for next Thursday. Most of all, I am happy that my team seems to be re-motivated due to quarters and on the same page again, and I hope to keep fostering communication and organisation as I have seen what happens when we take it too lightly.
