Whole Team:

After Soft opening, we discovered that some of the bugs in our game might ruin the whole experience in our game. And according to the feedback from faculty, we’ve concluded a few things that need to be updated:

1. Player should not be able to go below the tower
2. Sometimes the notes are too overwhelming
3. At the beginning, we should find a way to guide player to walk towards fire
4. Drum should be fixed, and removed the lines flying to it
5. The key should never go backwards
6. Adaptive level up

Hence, for this week, besides of refining art models, programmers also need to update their code to improve these key features, preventing them from ruining the player’s experience.

Game Design:

Maria:

This week I focused on designing around the feedback we got on Softs. The main critiques were about the beginning and the ending of the game. With Jiaqi, we redesigned the beginning to make it more clear to the player what they had to do by adding a door to the outside instead of just a flame. At the end, we also redesigned the fireworks to come out of the small tower in the middle. This way the player would turn around and look at the tower where all his/hers recordings would be found.

Throughout the week I also playtested every single iteration to make sure all the bugs were fixed and followed the design document. I also focused on editing the 30 sec and 3 min promo videos.

Game Produce:

Joseph:

During this week, I focus on finalizing our game, fixed the key generating system and triggers. and make the todo list and track the progress of the team. The list can be found here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UfFnf5bDFtRwSyFrlPsy-EzqehJR-ILjV3DefHlHYMU/edit#gid=0

Besides of that, I’ve recorded fraps for 3 prototypes. And I also started to do Archives for the whole project team.

Programming:

Fan:

According to the feedback from soft, I speed up the recording a little bit and make it more visible for people to see at the end of game. Then, I am working on post-mortem as well as the OM wiki page.

Kanglei:

This week I helped finalize the game, including fixing the tower lockdown bug, and helped artist import the art assets and finished a better start and ending.

Michael:

This week Michael focused on bug fixing and discussing soft feedback with team.

Michael changed drum setting to make it easier to be figured out by player.

Also, Michael has begun the documentation work which will be well presented on Organic Motion Wiki Page. This will also be Michael’s major work next week.

Art:

Jiaqi:

This week I refined art assets and made some new to serve the game better.

During the soft opening, we received polarized feedback from faculties. Some of them really love it, but some of them feeling that it was too overwhelming and don’t understand the design. In order to improve our game, we’ve set up a list to do on google drive to track the progress from soft opening to finals. Here are the feedbacks we got:

• Very polarizing discussion: some faculty really enjoyed the experience (e.g., to move in physical space and see and change a VR world through such movement), other faculty were annoyed (what should I be doing?), other faculty frustrated (it is broken…. …again….).
• Not clear why some actions are being done, e.g., hands-up for drums are also there to keep you recognized as the player skeleton by the system.
• Many pluses for those who experienced it, but many questions about reliability.

And upon this week, we’ve fixed most of the minor bugs, and now we are looking toward to modify some game features so player won’t feel too overwhelmed in our game. For example, we are going to remove the stairs and use the elevator instead. And there will also be more time between levels and before game starts.

In general, we are in a good shape and are going to finalize our game next week.

Game Design:

Maria:

This week I focused on the indirect control method we found worked on our last playtest. I created 5 different images representing the final look of the design. I also did a shader to facilitate this design.

I tested everything the developers were doing to see how the design was being implemented and what we could change for the playtest on friday.

For example the feedback the user gets when stepping on the correct/wrong key.

Programming:

Fan:

improved the recording.

Kanglei:

This week I polished the indirect control method as Maria’s design, implement the function that player can walk up the tower and helped remove/add any necessary environment element that helped the game.

Michael:

This week Michael focused on the effect to enhance the visual feedback of the game.

Michael uses particle and mesh of number to create a scoring effect to help people know how good their play is.

Michael also build a trace bubble to visualize the trace of notes to help player notice the order of the coming notes.

Apart from those, Michael helped other programmers to test and debug things and helped artist to move things forward faster.

On Friday, we had a grand playtest for 3 prototypes, and we invite more than 10 people to try out our games. For each tester, we gathered pre-playtest and post-playtest feedbacks from them. Among all 3 prototypes, Dancica and Mosica received mostly positive feedback, Icica is on the other hand confused most of the testers. But playtesters all enjoy the experience during playing.

Through this playtest, we also found some more technical issues that need to be solved. One of them is the lagging on Oculus Rift’s vertical tilting. We’ve tired out some solutions, including putting the wire into a backpack, but haven’t found the best solution to fix the problem yet. Other than that, our system works well, and we’ve also got some idea about the final big game.

For the half presentation, we’ve set up our draft presentation on drive, and the final version of the presentation itself will be done by Mar. 10th. Next week, 4 members in our team will head to GDC, and the following week of next week will be spring break. So we will get everything ready during spring break, and by Mar 15th, our team will have practiced the ½ presentation for more than once.

In this week, our team developed three executable prototypes: Different bodies, Body Music Generator and Dance Recorder. Each of the prototypes have been playtested on Friday, and according to the feedback, two of the prototypes need to be further polished so that the player can feel the immersiveness.