The Work This Week
Prototyping, Continued
Week 6 had witnessed some major advancements in prototyping. Design-wise, the team has fleshed out the economy structure with new methods to encourage players to try answering picoCTF questions. We also considered the possibility of using tokens from questions to unlock cosmetic items as the “safe reward”. Programmers were working together in order to overcome some of the challenges, namely UI needed for gameplay, trading system, and travel system.
Art-wise, the 3D artist and tech art have created models for one planet and one alien species, which have been implemented into the game world. We encountered some issues with WebGL support on Safari but fortunately, we got the thumbs-up from our client to drop Safari compatibility, which enables the linear color space in WebGL 2.0 that will have a better performance.
Theming
The team has reached an agreement on the game story, now more leaning towards repairing the broken spaceship with resources exchanged with aliens. We also renamed some of the planets, aliens, and resources in a way that is more understandable/less mouthful to players.
Client Meeting
The client meeting of this week followed a similar procedure as week 5, that we showed the latest game demo while explaining some design choices we made internally. We didn’t receive many comments from our client this time, but instead they showed the latest question page on their end which meant our team technically wouldn’t need to worry about implementing picoCTF question shell&popups anymore!
The Plan for Next Week
Next week, as halves is ticking away, the team will work together to check out everything we need for halves, build the slide deck for the presentation, as well as do at least one round of rehearsals with our instructors. Prototype-wise, we will have the vertical slice of our game done by Friday and test its viability.