“Progress lies not in enhancing what is, but in advancing toward what will be”

-Khalil Gibran

OVERVIEW

This week the team presented the project at a local event with the latest changes in the experience. These changes were influenced by the last week’s playtest on Saturday. The rest of the week the team worked on completely the project’s bits and pieces to implement required changes and polish existing content for Softs presentation.

PROGRESS

On Monday we presented our latest build project at the Kids Learning + Creativity Rally in Pittsburgh, PA. This build had quest mechanic changes based on the feedback and observation of Saturday’s playtest tour. We learned that the quests needed to be simple and should encourage exploration which was not happening with the initial quest design. We quickly prototyped a new version with two simple quests which were dependent on the fun facts about fish. This new mechanic was successfully tested at the showcase and thus the team decided to go ahead with this idea.

Keeping the near approaching date for Softs presentation, the team set tasks to be done each day by individual member on team. A to-do task list is being followed to keep everyone on same page with the development.

This week the designers came up with the required 15 quests which will be dependent on the provided fun facts. The fun facts were verified by our Marine expert who also helped us in providing few interesting facts about some fish on list. The designers also completed the fish interaction design. The artists as usual have been working hard to create fish models and this week completed 2 new fish. The programmers are writing codes to implement a robust system for the quest mechanic and also fixing minor issues.

Also we realized that an in app tutorial will be very helpful for any naive user to move ahead with the designed experience so we worked in designing these tutorials. The new final version will have a splash screen, followed by a menu screen which will display 4 buttons namely, “start”, “gallery”, “achievements” and “tutorial”.

PROSPECT

Next week as per the set goals, we will continue our work towards getting the final product done before Softs. Priority wise the quests will be added, a tutorial scene will be added as well, artists will start working on environment assets for underwater world. Polishing team website to add the teacher resource page and make promotional videos for our product. The team will also conduct playtest session on Wednesday in ETC.