Week 14 (30 Nov – 6 Dec 2015) – Softs

ETC Faculty John Dessler and Director Drew Davidson play our game and give feedback at Softs.
ETC Faculty John Dessler and Director Drew Davidson play our game and give feedback at Softs.

ART

  • New Character
  • Art assets for Final Puzzle
  • New UI

DESIGN

  • I spent the majority of this week making changes to the game based on feedback we received at softs. The bulk of these changes involved changing the level geometry to make the platforming portion of the game much easier. Another major wrap up task is getting the final scene into the game. To this end I’ve met with Kshitij and Akshay to plan out the final scene and create a task list to complete it.

PROGRAMMING

  • Integrated Sound Manager
  • Imported audio assets
  • Created logic for final puzzle
  • Fixed collision bug with the first explodable container
  • Sound Manager plays random BG tracks one automatically but keeps track of played tracks. So songs do not repeat
  • Got UI particle container transfer working in the final puzzle for PC and iOS
  • Cleaned repository because we were having issues with version control in the main scene

PRODUCTION

  • We had Softs this week on Monday, which was tough, as although we received a lot of useful feedback, I feel that our product could have been further along.  The team being separated during Thanksgiving and without a strict production structure it seemed that we were falling behind with much of our work.  We had one playtest at Elizabeth Forward High School, where we observed reactions to the new collection system and additional puzzles.  We also had a visit from Mr. Botzer and his students from Trinity High School, where we observed Mr. Botzer talking about the game with his students and took them on a tour of the building.  Production, while slow, looks to ramp up with my renewed efforts at organisation to give the team motivation towards the finish line.  We also need to think about end-of-term tasks like the finals presentation, archiving, postmortem, video and self-assessments.
We invited students from Trinity High School to the ETC for our final playtest, and Mr. Botzer conducted some great class discussions based on our game.
We invited students from Trinity High School to the ETC for our final playtest, and Mr. Botzer conducted some great class discussions based on our game.
Clearly, Mr. Botzer's favourite part of the tour was trying out the cockpit that the first years are using with their virtual reality game for festival.
Clearly, Mr. Botzer’s favourite part of the tour was trying out the cockpit that the first years are using with their virtual reality game for festival.