Week 13

Week 13 was shortened due to Thanksgiving, but it brought us a lot closer to our final product.  Now that we had gameplay that was widely regarded as fun, we set to work turning the game into a full, complete experience, both for the faculty at softs, as well as for our final deliverable to our client.  As we’re envisioning it, softs will actually be a good test for our final product, as we’re expecting Airsweeper to be shown as a brief, 5-10 minute demo after it’s delivered to our client.  As a result, we wanted to incorporate all the menus and functionality to see if it would be an enjoyable, intuitive experience.

This involved not only designing the menus, but getting in all the lottery and prize winning functionality as well.  It was a lot of work, but our team put in extra time over the break to get everything working properly.  In addition, we realized that while all the gameplay made sense to us, we’d need to introduce it more slowly so that new players could pick up and play the game without needing instructions from us.  To that end, we designed an entirely new set of levels that introduced gameplay concepts one piece at a time.

To augment this, we also created a series of instruction screens explaining the core gameplay concepts.  These served double duty as our loading screens, which was a nice bonus as that was another feature our game had been sorely lacking.

So, with that, we have our first complete, beginning-to-end gameplay experience ready.  It’s exciting to have something that, with a little more polish and refinement, we can hand over to our client and get out into the world.