capital Games Newsletter #10 – 11/2/2012

This Week:

Happy Halloween to all! Luckily, the specter that was Hurricane Sandy did little to disrupt our operations here in Pittsburgh.

Production Progress:

We’ve now finished all of our assets for the Introduction and Egg slice, including a major script rewrite to use more challenging words in context. We should be done implementing those in a build by later tonight.

We’ve begun work on our Apple slice, including a script, new art assets, an apple collection minigame, and another round of recording sessions with our voice actors. Next week, we’ll begin combining them all together to form the next chapter of our game.

Playtesting:

On Wednesday, we had our 4th playtest at the Children’s Museum. Unfortunately, because our new Egg experience wasn’t yet fully implemented, we concentrated more on making sure the Introduction provided a good starting point for kids in terms of both the narrative and the mechanics of our game.

As it was Halloween, we did have the good fortune of lots of playtesters available, as many schools were there for field trips. We were in a new situation where we had to almost fend potential testers off, which is a great problem to have. Nonetheless, we’re now looking at a game that might take up to 8 minutes to complete, so we’ve realized we’re starting to outgrow the Children’s Museum as a playtesting venue for our complete game – it is an environment with a lot of distractions, and moreover, it’s becoming more of an imposition to ask for the time of children (and usually their parents).

Albert and Anthony had a meeting with a preschool program in Braddock, PA. They have 4 classes of preschoolers totaling over 60, and seem to be very excited to host us for playtesting. We’re similarly excited to find such a large pool of naïve guests in our target demographic to carry us through the end of the semester.

We do realize that we’ve reached a limit, however – while we’re able to effectively test our game for fun and engagement (the “game” side of “educational game”), we’re hoping that Susan and her team can complement us by looking at the educational side of things, where educating kids is their expertise. There have been some technical hiccups in sharing iterations of our game between teams, but we hope to iron that out soon, while also sharing PC builds, so that Susan’s team can get a good look at our content regardless of platform.

On the Next Episode of Capital Games:

Next week is the implementation of our Apple assets, and the team switches back into pre-production and production on our next bit of content – flour! We aim to have all of our assets completed for Flour by the end of next week, as test both our Apple and Flour slices in two playtests the week of November 12.