Week 13 consisted of finishing our last major sprint for the semester, along with preparing final documentation and artwork. As stated in our previous blog post, our sprint this week consisted of tweaking the UI in accordance with several pieces of feedback we received last week. The main two features that we asked to be implemented were:
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- Allow the player to cancel unit selection. Once they selected a character, they felt like they were forced to use them because there was no UI indicator that they could cancel. There actually was a way to do this in the prototype, but nothing that the UI presented indicated this
- Allow players to more easily see the movement and health of units without needing to select them.
As you can see in the images below, we have implemented these changes within our prototype during this week’s sprint:
When hovering over a unit, players can see their movement and attack range. This allows them to better plan out their strategies. Also, health for all units is now placed below their character model.
We also added a clear undo button for moving and attacking, giving players an option to back out of these decisions in case they change their mind.
Another change we made had to do with our previously named Pope character. As you can see in the screenshots about, we changed his name to High Priest. It came to our attention from playtest feedback that using the name Pope can lead to greatly offending Catholic/Christian followers. While our game is based off of 14th century France, our world and characters are completely fake. For instance, our altar has a giant statue that depicts an angel (referenced to have similarities to Saint Michael the Archangel). Catholic churches always have their main altars/statues depict some form of Christ, so we are hoping that this visual indicator helps to show players that this is not the Catholic Church. With that being said, we changed the name Pope to High Priest to help mitigate any offense that may be taken from our experience. The last thing we want to do is offend people with the game that we create, so we think that this is the correct decision for our team. Unfortunately, the High Priest still shares physical characteristics of the Pope. We do not have the bandwidth to completely change his concept art with the time we have remaining, so we will leave that up to the next team to determine whether they believe it best to visually differentiate him more from the real world Pope.
On the art side, we have begun to create final model sheets for some of the characters, including the main character and High Priest, shown below:
This should help the 3D artists next semester to understand how to create these characters in a 3D model. We also iterated on our final environment concept art, tweaking the windows, scaling of various objects, and improving the lighting: 
We also have made great strides in forming our Art Documentation that will be passed along to the team next semester. This documentation will showcase the moodboard, initial sketches, iterations, and final concepts for the team next semester to review. We want to set the next team up to easily understand our head space for the art we have created this semester. This should allow them to more quickly build from our foundation.
Next week will be softs where our team will sit down with faculty, and discuss how to best finish our project with the time we have remaining.