It has been a long time since the last blog update.
Some of the team members went to SXSW and GDC and we finally had a chance to meet the Tap team!
At the end of week 8, we have decided to dive deep into the direction of the fully audio based games. During the spring break and the GDC week, we all spent some time researching about audio based experience storytelling. Surprisingly, there are many old school radio programs that are surprisingly good. In the era with no display devices, radio was the absolutely dominant way of daily entertainment. We tried several radio programs and there are many interesting things that we can learn from. The music can dramatically increase the mood or feeling that to be expressed. As for the movies, there are also some pretty interesting ones which if you just listen to the sound of the movie without looking at the pictures, you can still get the essence of the movie.
As for our specific product, we are going to tell a story happened in the universe which is about a lost and damaged ship returning to the earth in the future. It will be a mobile experience with the input from Tap. The main source of the information input is from the audio but we will also try to utilize the screen. The screen will only serve as a helper display HUD for the player.
We have 4 four weeks until the soft opening of this semester and during this time, we need to have a basically functional product. Since we are also having a playtesting day on the next Saturday, we would like to have a testable version of the game ready by the next Friday, to do which we would like to have a minimum playable version this week.
To start with, we decide to start with a small experience and we have got the storyline ready. It also has the most systems that we will need in the final product. With this being kind of like an internal reference, we can have a feeling about what it feels like to play an audio-based experience so that we can then tune that to implement a more robust version to be used for the playtesting day.
And a big shout out to the Tap R&D team, we now have the Haptic API for Tap with which we believe would greatly enhance the experience.