Week 13: Gearing up for Softs!

In advance of our Softs meeting with Pittsburgh faculty next Monday, we’ve been busy iterating on our pitch presentation and our gameplay demo in order to put us in the best possible position. We met with Pittsburgh Faculty on Thursday to brief them about the current state of the project in advance of Softs, and met with our client one more time before our Softs presentation next week.

The Work This Week

Updating Our Presentation and Demo

This week, we made great strides in trying to address some of the feedback we received in our client meeting last Friday, which included the following:

• Create an overall budget for the project
• Determine how many players will be required to successfully complete the game, since this wasn’t that concrete when we discussed it last week
• Consider what is our ideal scenario for getting non-Stadia users into our game
• Discuss if the Stream Connect feature is something that we could implement within our game if it gets funded.

In addition to the above tasks, we needed to do the following internally for both our presentation and our gameplay demo:

• Determine what distinguishes non-Stadia users from Stadia users in our game
• Create the UX flow of joining and sharing a game state inside of our game
• Integrate all the assets we’ve created so far into the same Unity file
• Look into NavMesh for simulating Virus AI
• Refine character shaders for our white blood cells and implement some simple animations for things like eating a virus

Of all the numerous tasks listed above, we were able to successfully implement most of them, with the refinement of the character shaders and their animations being too big of a task to be completed in a single week.

With these new additions to our presentation, we went into our meeting with Pittsburgh Faculty with a rough version of what we would show to them next Monday.

Pittsburgh Faculty Meeting

We scheduled a meeting with our faculty members for Softs this Thursday in order to brief them on the extensive changes that have been made to the nature of the project since our Halves presentation. We were able to give them a rundown on our progress since after Halves, as well as show them our latest iteration of our pitch presentation.

Overall, we received the following feedback:

• Why will people want to play together in our game? We spent a lot of time fleshing out our core systems of the overall gameplay, but we need to be more specific of how we’re making the multiplayer aspect more compelling.
  • we should also try to express this implicitly in the video mockups we create.
• On that note, will this experience still be fun if you were to play it by yourself?
• Really liked our concept art, since it gave a feel for the game’s overall tone without it necessarily being in-game footage. We were urged to try and place more of it throughout our presentation
• Game in general is solid, and we’ve done good work explaining some of the overall gameplay and systems. Some of these gameplay hooks are still a bit too vague, and could use more examples or video mockups to better explain how they would work.

We tried to tweak our presentation to respond to some of these criticisms before our client meeting the following day, trying to emphasize mechanics like Inheritance and Skill Sharing as a way to collaborate with others in our presentation.

Client Meeting

In our client meeting this week, we updated Erin on our current progress and asked her a couple of questions regarding the design of the non-Stadia UX, specifically if we could show non-Stadia users a sample of what skills they had acquired before they actually joined the game.

They had less to say this meeting than the last one, which ultimately meant that our latest iteration of the presentation had plugged some of the larger holes that we had discussed last week. Yay! They did have a bunch of salient comments of what we still needed to do to improve our presentation, however:

• We should include some sort of DLC chart that tracks what type of content we are going to release after the game has been launched, as well as when that content could launch
• Mockup our “upsell” screen of how we will get non-Stadia users into our game since we currently only have how players will share their game state with others in-game.
• Provide a skill chart that broadly details what kinds of skills are available in the game, as well as an example of how one of these skills could be used.

The Plan for Next Week

Based off of the feedback from both our Softs faculty and our client, we will be trying to update what we can of our pitch presentation in advance of Monday’s meeting. Other than that, our larger goals for Week 14 are mainly the following:

• Better explain why playing with others in our game would be fun or necessary
• Create a chart of the kinds of skills that can be acquired by players in the game and illustrate their use quickly and simply
• Come up with a DLC release schedule
• Create a mock-up of when non-Stadia users join the game
• Design tasks that will require players to collaborate by using their skills together to hunt viruses.