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By having majority of the art assets implemented, our game, DoReMi Pets, has a more complete look and feel than ever before. Three instruments –Timpani, Clarinet, and French Horn–are already fully functional in the game. Violin’s prototype is finished, and it’s going to be implemented real soon. By the end of next week, Crescendo Encore’s all four instruments should be available for playing the game with.

Our playtest with target audience has been started since last week. The plan is to have a small group of playtesters every week; we find problems and fix them right away. The team hopes to have four major iterations before delivering the game.

On Wednesday’s playtest, we had a Mom come in with one 7 year old boy and one 6 year old girl. Both the boy and the girl tried out the three available instruments. From observing them playing, the team found out the following things. First of all, the players had fun in the game. Without being requested by the team, each of them asked more than once to play the game again. Second, players tended to forget about the blowing interaction. They seemed too busy matching the fingering. Third, one of the players had a hard time in realizing where her track was when she tried the game for the very first time. Last but not the least, going through the menu to join the game, select difficulty and music pieces was a mess. After being instructed how to hold the instruments, the red(“go back”) and green(“select”) buttons on the instruments were frequently mis-pressed by the players.

Based on what we found in playtest, team Crescendo Encore is acting on them by taking out the blowing for “easy” mode, giving instrument track location hint before music starts, and re-assigning buttons on the controllers only for the menu system.

In addition, the team has started working on the tutorial, and the final casing of the instruments’ circuits and wires.