Week 15 (4/28 – 5/2)

Previous Week

Last week the team presented a prototype for soft opening, and then took the feedback and created an overhauled user interface aesthetic and layout to give the more unified experience the faculty suggested.

Week Overview

This week the team’s artists continued to work on some remaining elements of the user interface at the beginning of the week, and the designer’s acquired sounds and made small revisions while the programmers worked on integrating assets as they were completed and addressing bugs.

Progress

With the end of the semester approaching and the team’s deadline to get the deliverable to the client next week, we set Friday as the deadline for introducing any new content.

By Friday the team was able to get in all the new UI art and adjust the design of the game’s quest system so that players received some guidance from our in-game objective’s (which we are calling adventures).

This way, the players are taught how to play the game through the gameplay itself, so they retain the game ‘rules’ better and their experience is not unnecessarily interrupted.

With our game, ‘Questyinz Island’, completed by Friday, we had one last playtest on Saturday to gauge how well our players were able to understand the game and to see if there were any small last minute adjustments that could give the players a better experience.

Prospect

We addressed the last remaining technical issues this weekend and we are really happy with the result of this semester’s hard work.

This weekend’s playtesters, two boys ages 7 and 10 who had played our half semester prototype, were much more engaged with our finished product.  They were able to understand how to play the game and only sought clarification when encountering a few minor bugs that have since been addressed.  They also obviously enjoyed the player to player interactions.  One of the player’s said he didn’t want to stop playing the game when asked if he was ready to move on to playtest another game.

In the upcoming week we will give Questyinz Island over to the client to merge the remaining code in order for it to be launched in June and we will prepare for our final presentation on Wednesday.