With Thanksgiving break coming this week, the team was busy wrapping up the development by Tuesday. Despite the absence of client meeting, the team still had the faculty meeting and carried out the planned playtest.
The Work This Week
Pico Challenge Playtest
This week, with the pico challenges implemented on the test game website, we were finally able to carry out our second round of playtesting with real challenge-token communication implemented!
Additionally, the team invited Ziheng, a peer game designer to playtest the game (again) in a Zoom meeting where he shared his play screen. It seemed that the game has improved a lot user experience-wise after two weeks’ polishing process, and he offered one suggestion that we thought was worth implementing: to offer some rewards when the player finished the inhabitant quest (e.g. Yians will give the player some Yiaberries) to enhance the game feedback and encourage the player to complete more quests.
Faculty Meeting
We updated our faculty instructors with the latest build on the website as usual. Most of the UI was working well at this stage, and the critique was more high-level: to make sure the visual consistency throughout the game is well kept and serves the sci-fi world setting we are pursuing. They suggested us to find a peer UI/UX designer to get more feedback.
Apart from the routine content update, our faculty pointed out another important aspect: to make a plan for the Softs and moving forward. Their suggestions included:
- We should spend some time hovering the mouse over different parts of the UI to communicate what everything does and make sure that our viewers are not confused.
- Take some time and script out our playthrough of the game. Think about the user journey and follow that.
- Look at who will be visiting for Softs. Consider altering our presentation to cater to them more.
All information was super insightful!
Creating an Outline for Softs
After the faculty meeting, the team has been discussing internally how to better present our game on the Softs. First of all, we confirmed each member’s role:
- JD will be sharing her screen and playing the game, while Liangzheng will be explaining the game to the faculty and answering most questions.
- Andrew will be taking notes.
- Everybody on the team will be prepared to answer questions as well, especially those that involve a specific role (tech/art/design).
And as suggested by the faculty instructors, we confirmed how to make most of the 15 minutes as in one section:
- We will quickly explain the background of the contest, the relationship between the contest and our game, and how to access our game within the very first minute;
- We will then use 8 minutes to play the game (probably not enough to beat it), showcasing its core gameplay;
- The remainder of the time will be spent answering questions and listening to the faculty’s feedback.
We agreed to meet again this Sunday to go through the Softs outline just to be prepared (psychologically) for the Softs.
Peer UI Feedback
Luckily, the team was able to invite Lai, our peer UI/UX designer, to try out the game and got her valuable feedback. The problem at this stage was still mainly in the onboarding process, for which we were suggested to use fancier visuals in order to create an illusion of the space theme. She liked the overall art style (especially some planets) which is very heartening for us.
Client Meeting
No client meeting on Zoom this week because of the Thanksgiving break! The team has been communicating with our clients via Discord throughout the week. As for the WebGL problem mentioned in the tech part above, our client also didn’t have a perfect solution yet, which leads to the possibility of adding some “refreshing the page” hint on our end.
The Plan for Next Week
Based on the feedback from both our Softs faculty and our client, we will be trying to update what we can of our pitch presentation in advance of Monday’s meeting. Other than that, our larger goals for Week 14 are mainly the following:
- Go over the Softs feedback and make a plan to move forward.
- Wrap up the game, including any bugs, visual glitches, and art assets (not too many).
- Prepare the design and tech documentation.
- Create the project trailer.