Week 11 (3/31 – 4/4)

Previous Week

Last week the team  presented at the half semester mark.  Based on faculty feedback, we shifted our development direction to focus on in game communication and social features in order to give our client and players the product that would best meet their needs.

Week Overview

This week the team hashed out the exact steps we would take for production in order to change the focus of our functionality and art style and still have a significant component at the end of the semester.  The team then began working on the associated tasks and we were able to have a playable demo with some updated art assets and a separate demo of our book decorating tool for the ETC Playtest day at the end of the week.

Prototype of our planned book cover decoration interface. Users tested the interface out and gave us feedback.

Users try out a demo with updated art and some new animation, as well as prototype of upcoming features.

Progress

During this week our artists had two main tasks: converting existing assets and creating new models where necessary that fit our new Tiki Island theme and generating animations for the characters that we could use for communication in the game.  The designers worked on specifications for how the players could communicate and how this functionality would be integrated, as well as how additional social aspects could be developed for the books and bookshelf without going outside scope.  The programmers created a prototype for the book decorating interface, finished the quests, and began implementing the interface for in game communication.  Maria, our backend programmer, also began designing the solution for allowing players to see each other’s characters move and animate real time.

Prospect

Our team was able to quickly adapt to our new direction and made a lot of progress this week from the development standpoint.  Our playtest at the end of the week showed that many of our players would respond positively to the planned feature of decorating their book covers and showing them to other players.  The team was also excited to see that even with the transitional art assets the virtual world felt more alive and cheery.  This coming week the team plans to continue working hard in order to have the communication system prototyped for another playtest at the end of the week.

Additional Features in the works:

• In game instructions
• Character to character book recommendation