It’s time for halves already! Gotan has been hard at work putting in features, fixing bugs and more generally getting everything ready for halves. Unlike projects in Pittsburgh, projects at SV do a guest demo session apart from the 15 minute presentations, so we need the game to be as polished as possible. Before that however, there were a few other events that happened earlier in the week.
On Monday, some of the artists from the 17th Animation Show of Shows stopped by at EA (courtesy Carl) and showed off their short films. Team Gotan, in typical Team Gotan fashion, took the opportunity to show them our game! They are a great bunch of artists and it was a great watching them get immersed into the game and wander around the EA lounges with Tangos strapped to their heads. They also had some valuable feedback about the art and design of the game.
Tuesday we had Jessica Trybus visit us and check out the game. It’s interesting how different this playtest was compared to Mondays. Jess was a lot more uncomfortable in the headset and took some time to orient herself in the new space. She did manage to keep it on for quite a while though and said she thoroughly enjoyed the experience of walking around and feeling things around her. More importantly though, she gave us a lot of input on what made it uncomfortable for her. For example, she was thrown off by the constant flickering of certain voxels in the world. She felt like she couldn’t quite make sense of her surroundings and wanted something to help ground her (familiar objects that she can use to orient herself, like trees or shrubs in a forest world). This is all very valuable feedback and we will address all of this as soon as we can.
After those two days of informal playtesting, we knew exactly what we wanted for halves, and also chalked out a plan for the next month and a half leading up to Finals. The second half of the week was spent putting in all the features into the game and polishing the experience. We have a fairly solid experience at this point and are pretty excited to present all the progress we’ve made to everyone at EA.
Speaking of presentations, we also started figuring out how and what we were going to present. We have a basic slide-deck ready and had one round of practice presentations with Carl on Friday. We will practice some more over the weekend and have another round of practice with Carl on Monday after which we should be pretty well prepared.
Apart from halves presentations, we also have our ETC field trip to Monterey Bay Aquarium scheduled on Friday. So next week is looking to be a pretty intense and exciting one already!