capital Games Newsletter #9 – 10/26/2012

Halves:

On Wednesday, the team gave our Half-Semester Presentation at the ETC. This was our chance to let the greater community of ETC faculty, students, and even guests know what we are doing. We received many thoughtful questions about our designs and mechanics, and were happy to clarify the research that we had done to reach this point. Most importantly though, we laid out our roadmap for the rest of the semester, and are looking to push forward with the project.

Pushing Forward:

Our game now has a working title: “Food Quest” – While there were many fun things that we could have done with our title, we believe that short and simple without complex wordplay is the way to go.

One of our programmers, Cintia, has already begun prototyping an apple-collecting mini-game for the next section of Food Quest. We are testing the idea of having a timing-based game where the kids must drop apples from a tree into a moving basket below.

The artists have essentially completed all the new backgrounds, items, and character animations for our introduction. Moreover, our sound designer has recorded all new dialogue for our introduction and egg slice, except for the farmer character. These assets are ready for implementation, and we hope to see that next week.

On the Next Episode of Capital Games:

Next week will be very important in terms of settling back into production mode for the last half of the semester. The programmers will be building and implementing the introduction of our game, as well as polishing the apple mini-game. The team will solidify the direction of the apple-finding portion of the game, and the artists will need to complete the assets for this section of our game by the end of next week as well.

The team will also be conducting a quick playtest of the implemented introduction combined with the egg-finding quest on Wednesday at the Pittsburgh Children’s Museum. In addition, a few of us will be meeting with the 4kids Early Learning Center in Braddock, PA to discuss playtesting with them in the future. All-in-all, there’s a lot of work to do so expect Capital Games to make some “capital” gains in the near future.