Month: November 2015

It's Thanksgiving this week! Which means that our dev time is going to be a bit shorter this week as well.  Soft Opening demo day is next Wednesday at which we will be demoing our game at EA for everyone to play.  (sounds a little scary.)  We're excited!  But we're in the process of finishing some things to prepare for this big event.  Mainly, we've been working on our level selection menu.  We have mock-ups and the phone controller has been set-up to work with the menu.  The menu just has to be completed.  We're designing it to only use swiping as a selection method, no buttons.  Hopefully that's a cool and works as well as we think it should.  

We've also been working on some new videos and new systems in the game.  Not going to reveal what those are yet, but it'll be a surprise next week!  Here's a small update on our phone UI to tie things over.  

-Faceless Prod.

A game really feels like it's coming together when you begin to see the art for it and it fits the game.  Our UI artist got some great new art assets to us this week and we implemented them for our FIRST demo with kids.  Along with the art changes, we also added additional sound effects and visual feedback for the demo.  Each alien character had their own individual sound that plays when a player finds an object.  These two layers of feedback help A LOT.  The kids and their parents that played the game all understood who their character was, when they found an object AND how many points they received.  

The multiplayer results stayed relatively the same with a few small changes.

In addition to the playtest, we had a surprise visit from some people who are involved with the games platform that we're developing for.  We had them play our game and they really enjoyed the experience.  Definitely a huge plus for our team.

We are still in the process of creating our menu navigation system.  The level select menu is being created on one end while the phone navigation is being created on another.  Using your phone, you will be able to navigate through the game screen on the tv; select your levels, choose difficulty, select the mode, and start the game.  Once this is in place, the complete overall game experience will be together.  

If we had to say what stage of development we're in, it's a mixture of polish and finishing some final features.  Without a doubt, we still have some more layers of visual and sound feedback to make the game more exciting and create a good feeling for players.  We're also making some new content but that's an ongoing thing.  We would liek to have great guidelines for future designers to make more fun levels for the game after we hand our project off to the EA team.

Next week is Thanksgiving so it will be a short week for us.  Work hard and eat a lot!

 

-Faceless Prod.

This week's focus revolved around multiplayer changes, testing some new ideas, and creating some new features for our Authoring Tool.  

Our multiplayer experience feels okay right now but we wanted to try another method for the game, mainly what would it be like if player's had to compete for only 1 item at a time.  Our fears were true about this mode.  Once one player started winning and was really good, the other players would not get any points.  So we scratched that idea.  Now we're polishing the current multiplayer.  We finally added a temporary result screen for it which is great.  What's missing now is some additional levels of feedback and placing the feeling of competition throughout the level.

This week we also experimented with a new location-based controller.  Player's must swipe in the direction of the "object panel" and not the location of the object on the screen.  This was a simple idea that we thought to try for dealing with our accuracy and object overlapping problem.  It also should add a small amount of difficulty.  We're going to test this next week.

Currently, we don't have any menu screens or ways to navigate the game experience using the phone.  These things are crucial to the final game so we're going to begin working on that next week.  We already have some mock-ups so all that's left is implementing those and testing which navigation ideas work the best.  We also plan to add level rankings to each of the levels we currently have and showing those on the level select screen.  The functionality has been added to the tool as of now.

Here's a random idea we're going to try!  What if we had a level that was 10min long?...is there a way to make that engaging to players for the entire experience.  We don't know so we're going to make one!  Look out for updates on how that went next week.

 

-Faceless Prod.

What a interesting week! Our UI Developer, Jack, left us last Friday to go back to Taiwan for his wedding preparations so we lost him until Thursday. Which means we lost one of our programmers. This halted some of our progress in some areas but we continued working on other things; rankings in multiplayer, new videos, and game data. Due to some unforseen bugs (as they always are), we weren't able to finish getting game data from player's but we'll finish it early next week. This is a pretty important thing for the designers and for giving player's feedback about how well they did in the game. We experimented with new videos using trailers from some of EA's games. All trailers don't work well for good gameplay but some of them, like the Sims, were great to use!

 

Multiplayer

Multiplayer is making steady progress. Players can now see their real time ranking during gameplay. As you can see below, we've changed the position of the player icons to be on the right and they change based upon who has the most points.  We believe this is going to help player's keep up with how well they are doing and fuel the competitive nature of the game mode. It still needs some testing and some more layers of feedback. After all, these levels have a lot going on.

Making a Cohesive Experience

The team came up with a story for the game this week. It actually didn't take us long. Maybe it's because we understand our experience so well and it lends itself easily to a simple story. Players are going to be "Alien Agents" on a mission to gather information for their home planets. The aliens use transmitters pads to receives messages and send information to home planet through the videos they watch.

It's a simple story idea that allows us to expand on levels, have varying types of content, and most importantly guides our Theming! Look forward to some new images as we finish our UI and character via our artist, Bing.

On Thursday, our teams took at little trip to visit some game studios up north. It was really fun to learn more about Toys for Bob and the Skylanders series that they've been working on. Unfortunately, we don't have any pictures because we couldn't take any. 🙁

Next week we'll be focusing on adding result screens for multiplayer, connecting the menu between the phone and the game, testing videos, enhancing player feedback, and adding new systems to the game. Whew, sounds like a fun week ahead!

-Faceless, Prod.

Our halves presentation went really well!  Most of this week had been spent in preparation for halves; fixing small bugs for demos, practicing our presentation, and doing a little work towards future game features.  We had about 18 people show up for our and project GoTan's presentation.  A fairly small crowd, but big enough for us to be busy during the demo half.  After we presented, we demoed our game in a separate room.  There were 2 single player stations and 1 multiplayer station.  Just as we thought, those who played multiplayer cheated off each other by pressing the object button if the other players recently pressed it.  This was very expected considering there had been little changes since our previous playtest.  

The following day, we had some visitors from Intel come to play the two teams games.  They noted how great a game this would be if 10+ people could all play it at once.  Imagine it being in a movie theater!  People would play the game during the commercials using their phones. It would make waiting for the movie a lot more enjoyable.  

The teams went to the Monterrey Aquarium on Friday so we didn't have much of an opportunity to work except for Monday and Thursday.  We're refocusing ourselves next week to improve the multiplayer, do more experimentation, make some more videos, and expand upon what we have now.

-Faceless Prod.