Newsletter 10

Welcome back to  neuraltone! These last couple of weeks have been a little different, as we split our time between spring break and Halves preparation. Major advances were made on the game itself: we designed a new turret graphic, updated the background graphics, implemented more feedback for player actions, and revamped the enemy ship designs.

Additionally, we delivered a working version of the game to Dr. Holt and her team on the 14th. By the 17th, we had received solid research results that showed the implicit learning seemed to be remaining intact! We believe that we can make this design work well and as of now have no plans to revert to the first-person game ideas.

Halves presentations were on Monday, and the team did an admirable job presenting our project to faculty and guests of the ETC.

We received a few questions about the aiming and reloading mechanics that we have taken into consideration as we continue with development. These questions prompted a playtest that we conducted on the 21st, which showed that most players are confused by the reloading and would like more feedback about how well they are doing in the game.

Finally, development on the customization tool has begun. Rod, Lei, and Jingyi have been working on designing a robust game variables class that the tool will be responsible for filling out, and the serialization of that class is ready to go already.

We’ve still got a long ways to go, but these last couple of weeks have boosted morale and we believe we will deliver something useful /and/ cool by the end of the semester!