Week 8

It has been two calendar weeks since week seven’s newsletter. The team decided to take the GDC week off, and work through out spring break. We are in week 8 on Crescendo Encore’s project schedule, it is also spring break week on CMU’s academic calendar.

Crescendo Encore had the first round of external playtest at the end of week 7. It helped us not only found out some user experience issues which we didn’t think of, but also strengthen the idea of solving the design challenges that we have been addressing. Based on the playtest feedback, we are making changes in the following ways: fixing the notes feedback position, increasing clarinet’s volume, adding metronome pre-beats, putting in single drum tremolo for timpani, and reducing the Timpani hitting sound.

In the meantime, the team has also set the goal for playtesting with family and children in week 10. We are hoping to have blowing interaction available on both hardware interaction and visual feedback, refine notes feedback, get menu UI art assets to give player clear guidance, have individual combo system implemented, have two difficulty modes online for Clarinet and Timpani, and display performance accuracy in text after the gameplay.

For hardware, we purchased another French Horn. It’s a little smaller than the old one, and it’s in great shape.

Half semester presentation is around the corner. Besides working on reaching the playtest goal for week 10, Crescendo Encore has also been working on the presentation preparation. The team decided to have a short live demo in the presentation, we hope to get more feedback so that we’ll be ready for playtesting with families and children in Week 10.