ART
- Made first pass for the character & its animations
- Worked on art assets for the Puzzle
- Explored how to implement in-game feedback VFX
DESIGN
- This week, I started building levels in earnest. I tuned the jumping so that the game was more playable and worked with Akshay to get our movement controls more usable. I designed and built the base level geometry for Charles’s Law island and put in the Charles’ Law jump puzzle. Cheryl-Jean and I also drove down to Washington, PA to visit the Trinity School. We were very pleased with their level of excitement about the project. They were very cooperative and offered many opportunities for us to test with their students. This turn of events has caused Cheryl-Jean and I to fast track the design of our evaluation methods. This week I was frustrated with the amount of time I had to spend on non-project work. I feel like Charles’ Law island could be farther along. Next week I’m looking forward to getting a lot of different physics puzzles into the level and begin polishing the gameplay. I also hope to work with Akshay to get our version control working for Macs. This will allow us to build to the iPads more quickly as well as allow me to work on the project from my laptop.
PROGRAMMING (Akshay)
- Implemented heating character ability
- Added Kshitij’s art assets into the game – container, cylinder, piston, connector, gate, etc and got them working with the existing code.
- Tweaked our particles to look better and similar to Kshitij’s concept art
- Handed off physics tools to Julian, so he can drag and drop the prefabs into the scene and they’ll work as intended
- Created our first physics puzzle, the piston jump puzzle with these tools
- I’ve been using JIRA every day, creating and managing my tasks so we can all be on the same page in terms of organization.
- Had our first build day (to test the first Charles Island level) and hopefully received some helpful feedback from everyone.
PRODUCTION
- On Monday, we had our first retrospective and began to nail down sprint planning. Retrospective gave us a good insight into what we struggled with in the past weeks, and I am working towards solving these problems throughout the semester. Organisation has proved more important than we previously planned. Sprint planning gave us concrete goals for up until quarters, and I tried a new method of doing this using the whiteboard to list and break down stories into tasks. Team buy-in has definitely been a challenge with using JIRA, but I continue to try and show its effectiveness at keeping us all on the same page. With Akshay’s build meetings, I hope the team is better able to see our progress more concretely. The biggest success this week for me was the teacher meeting with Trinity High School, which was very productive. Our school contacts there are very excited about the game and have provided us with numerous insights about using technology in the classroom, evaluating students, facilitating discussion and even provided lesson plans. It is fortunate that we have found experts who are engaged and enthusiastic about the work we do. I hope to foster this partnership and playtest regularly at their school.
