The Work This Week
Meeting with Faculty
Besides the regular faculty meeting with Ruth and Heather, the team had three extra playtest/feedback sessions with John, Shirley, and Ricardo, during which we received a good amount of feedback directly. The three faculty members liked the overall feeling of the game and agreed with the direction we were heading, while giving useful advice on how to improve the parts that would affect the user experience.
Implementing Tutorials
As mentioned in the week 11 blog, the team has summarized the playtest feedback and was ready to implement quality-of-Life improvements. We got rid of text-heavy tutorials in the onboarding section, and instead use image tutorials built into the main game.
Tech
The programmers have also been working with the CMU team to integrate game questions in HTML-score API. Considering our playtesters, we decided to use “fake” questions that will literally just indicate “you need to wait for 15 minutes” to give a hint of how long the challenge will likely take them.
Art
Evelyn and JD are working hard on finishing out the rest of the planets and inhabitants. We were on the schedule and by the end of the week, we have finished six of eight planets and all four inhabitants’ models. We will keep evaluating the art and try to finish the rest by the softs.
Client Meeting
During this week’s client meeting we showcased the current build to our clients. They liked the visual update because the font made the game much more legible and the use of icons to cut down on the amount of text we use was a good choice. Also they liked the continuity of using the progress bars in a number of different places.
Our clients also raised two questions that were worth thinking about. The first was: with regard to inhabitants’ dialogue, do we have control over the outcome of the random letter insertion and how can we avoid the creation of bad words? Over the discussion, we agreed on hardcoding the random letters that are being generated to get around this, but this again made us more aware of the target audience and the possible social impact our game might have. The second question was about the ending of the game. Our clients pointed out that we should make our ending clear because if the winning teams are playing the game looking for hidden flags, we need to let them know when they are done with the game. We planned in the following weeks to polish our ending more.
The Plan for Next Week
Week 13 will be sort of a special week because of the Thanksgiving break and the softs walkaround on Monday of week 14. The team will run the final round of playtesting with the “fake” challenges implemented to see if the idle part needs further adjustment and if the current economy is well balanced. Other than that, the team will try to finish the one last piece of story and art. From the production standpoint, we will also be preparing for the softs and the ETC festival with necessary materials.