The Work This Week
Softs Presentation
This week, we had our Softs Presentation with the faculty and we continued to iterate on our game based on both the feedback we received from our presentation, as well as from the playtest feedback last week. Many thanks to everyone who participated in our presentation and playtests!
Putting Things Together
The team has agreed with the faculty that at this point the major task was ensuring the robustness of the game build and enhancing the user experience as much as we possibly could.
Based on the feedback, the designers have made several changes to the game balance, including making both the travel time and token’s travel time reduction longer, to encourage the contestants to answer CTF challenges; lowering the threshold of unlocking all achievements to a more reasonable level; and we make the engine upgrade stronger, with the realization that few playtesters were hooked by the engine upgrade. The adjusting process felt much like fine tuning a real game: it’s always hard to get things perfect on the first try, that’s why testing and iterations are always more important than they look like.
For the UI, we re-designed some of the UI elements to make them fit more into the game. While making a game with rich UI elements proved to be a daunting task for the team, we managed to produce the interface clean and understandable (not that fancy, of course), as praised by some of the playtesters.
The artists on the team have also been trying hard to make some additional polishing, including the icons of the ship skins, animations for the inhabitants, and the ship skins that are still under development.
Lastly, thanks to the efforts of the programmers, our game is getting really close to a bug-free experience! It was never an easy thing: the programmers have been experiencing WebGL issues and browser adaptations throughout the semester, and making a game that stands on its own on the webserver was also a big job.
Client Meeting
This week’s client meeting is the second to last of this incredible semester! Several things were discussed and determined during the meeting:
- The name of the game! It’s officially Adruppian Odyssey and will be used in promotions and presentations!
- The way to evaluate the effectiveness of our game. Among the options including Google Analytics, in-game tracker, and tracking from the client’s end, we ultimately decided to only track things that will be applicable to all games each year (as each game will be different), the more detailed data will likely just sit and collect dust, which means we will be counting how many times the game gets launched.
- The way to hand off our project to the CMU team. In order to keep things smooth and in case some changes need to be made after this semester, we will summarize a tech documentation and comment our code.
The Plan for Next Week
It’s certainly been quite a wild ride to look back on everything we’ve gone through and accomplished since September! As the specter of Final Presentations looms ever closer, we have outlined the following tasks for week 15 that we still need to accomplish:
- Create the trailer.
- Test out the build in Unity 2020 LTS to see if doing so will fix the “quit” issue that we have with the Unity 2019 LTS version we are currently using.
- Create our slide deck for Final Presentations!