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.