Week 8 and 9 are connected by the spring break. Week 8 had the half presentation and Week 9 had GDC, so we combined them and used it to finish our second sprint. The work was done productively, now we are very clear about our capacity and schedule in the near future.

Production

The first day of week 8 we had our half presentation. Feedback from it showed that we have a lot of space to improve, especially in communicating some of our design decisions and the reasons behind them. In the rest of week 8 we started our second sprint, aiming on finish more system building and a small act of the story.

The sprint lasted till the end of week 9. By Thursday, which is our weekly build day, we successfully finished our tasks scheduled for the sprint. Now we finally have a 30 second game for people to play and criticize! How exciting.

– Magian

Design

Brian is out at GDC, he’ll be back and tell more about design later!

Tech

During these two weeks, we’ve developed a versatile dialogue system that can render dialogues in different formats. The first one is the traditional RPG dialogue: A panel at the bottom, with the portrait and the name of the character speaking on one side and the dialogue filling the rest of the space. The other one looks like a telnet chat room: All messages are displayed on an in-game terminal, which we will use for most of the communications in the game.

Another major feature we implemented was an inventory system. For the purpose of our story and puzzles, the player character needs to be able to carry things around. Both the backend of the inventory system and the frontend UI are now complete, and now the player can use items in their inventory.

To reach our goal for the alpha, we’ve also made the introduction sequence of our game. During the introduction, the player will get to know the background of our story and learn the basic concepts, and would allow us to get playtest feedbacks.

– Max

Story

Week 8:

We described the story during our halves presentation which helped us clarify it for ourselves. We drew more storyboards to help us present the story to others.

We have little progress on paper this week for our beats and script, but there’s been a lot of discussion. We’ve developed story ideas about how to remove one of the guiding characters to reduce confusion but still retain the plot device of having the once-reliable guiding character become suddenly unreliable for a moment.

We’ve also worked with the client’s problem team to help with problem theming by providing 12 images that we think might be found on the servers of the antagonist.

Week 9:

This week we started working on turning the story beats into dialogue and strings that can be uploaded to the computer.

We created a script of the first three chapters of the story so that a user experience design and tech demo can be made up to that point. We also created a csv file from the script that can be easily read by code and we are working with the tech team to figure out the best way to add dialogue to the game.

We also discussed with the client ways that we can tease the story before the competition starts

– Tina

Art

Week 8:

This week we created more assets and tiles.

• We drew new cords for the main room for connecting the rooms based on feedback of the first version
• We started on the concept art of the Volcano room, but the tiles for the room are put on hold for now; after a team discussion we decided to prioritize the bedroom
• We completed the concept art of the bedroom

• We completed the basic tiles for the bedroom and are starting on the basic assets
• We made significant progress on the tiles for the tree canopy in the Forest room

Week 9:

This week we mainly worked on room tiles for the bedroom and the forest.

• We completed the whole set of bedroom tiles and objects in the bedroom
• We completed the forest tiles, mainly working on the giant tree in the forest
• We also completed a tinted version of the bedroom tile that is the start of the game

– Tina

Other things we did in the two weeks:
>> Since we were missing teammates in the both weeks during the game night, we skipped the activities, what a pity!
>> The team had a group dinner with the whole picoCTF 2019 team, big party!

For the next week, we’re planning to:
>> Iterate on the first act of the game
>> Get more story in the game
>> Think of the feedback from the alpha test

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