Overview

Hello everyone! This week the team made a quick start to the week with halves presentation on Monday with team Legato in Pittsburgh. Team Thunderegg on the other hand made their presentation on Wednesday. For the remaining of the week, we worked hard to get 3 new shooting prototypes ready for our playtest on Saturday.

Progress over the Week:

Half of the week was spent to prepare for the halves presentation. The team prepared the presentation content together and did two different presentation in two different locations. Team Legato had their presentation in Pittsburgh on Monday, while team Thunder Egg did theirs in EA campus on Wednesday. You can watch the presentation in the link below.

For the rest of the week designers came up with 3 different prototypes for our playtest on saturday.

360 degree rotation with cannons: In this prototypes, players can rotate their cannons until they hit another one with by using the rotation gesture on their phone. And they simply tap on a button to shoot cannons straight ahead. Navigator still controls the vertical movement. In addition to that he controls a shield around the ship to provide additional protection

Fixed cannons with no aiming: Cannons have a fixed position in front of the ship and players can shoot bullets by simply tapping on the screen. The navigator controls the vertical movement, but he also rotates the ship so that cannons face where the enemies come from.

Fixed cannons with limited aiming: Mostly same with the previous prototype only this time cannon shooters can move slide their finger left and right to determine the direction of their bullets within the 30 degrees of their cannon.

Programmers did an amazing job implementing all these 3 different prototypes. They also implemented a “Donut Hole” event in which players are required to work together to save their ship from being sucked into. Artists provided all the art assets needed for the prototypes in addition to this delicious swirling donut. Our sound designer decided to remove the FMOD integration as it proved to be unreliable and causing memory problems. We will try out the Wwise audio platform to control our sound and music.

Next Steps:

The team wished to determine the most intuitive shooting mechanic on this weekend’s playtest by making playtesters play all three versions and get their feedback. Moving forward, as the team started producing content much faster with their improved pipeline, they will be working on adding more group events and enhancing the cooperation.