This week was an arduous one for the tech team, and saw a big transition in the team’s mindset from progressing forward to realizing that the end product will have to be fully produced soon. With that in mind, everyone worked extra hard to get as close as possible to a playable prototype, and, sure enough, we got there! Let’s get into the process that made it happen.
The tech team really pulled all the separate pieces of the app into one fully playable prototype this week. They pulled the latest night in the history of the project, all of them working well past four in the morning on Sunday night and one spending the night on the couch in the project room, but they had a tremendous amount of work to show for it; The News, Bank, Team, and Email apps were all finished. The clusters have been fully implemented and their modules assigned. The text app’s ability to load states was finished. The database side of Circle Up, Email, News, Bank, Situations, Clusters, Profiles, and Text were all finished.
The art team has also been hard at work on various user interfaces, notably email, as well as finalizing the logo for the game and the intro pages for each character. They also worked on shaders for the graph in the bank app that shows the player’s monetary trends.
The design team has been finalizing the dialogue in all the different situations in the game, and getting the client’s approval. The design team has also been editing the project video, mostly by cutting down the interview footage that has been collected so far into nuggets of quotes that might appear in the documentary and cataloging all of those.
The game is finally starting to feel complete now. We still have to implement most of the dialogue that has been written and fix some UI bugs, but the product is starting to feel very real and complete, which has been very exciting. Now here’s hoping we can carry this productivity and success into our soft opening next Tuesday!