Newsletter 11

GDC Week is over, and the team has been hard at work finishing up the game in preparation for softs. Work on the customization tool has begun in earnest, and we’ve received another set of data from Dr. Holt’s research team. The consensus on their end is that the data patterns seem to follow their original game closely. There is a high level of variability between research participants, but the overall numbers show improved ability to differentiate the sounds. We are showing a 25% chance of learning the sounds now, but the original game showed improvements between 40 and 50%, so we hope that we can match that before the end of the semester.

With the customization tool in development, we hope to have a working version by the end of week 12. Everything in the game is ready to receive data, and now we’re at the point…

where the tool needs to begin creating the data. More on that later, as the tool develops!

Finally, on Saturday the 6th, we conducted a playtest with naive users visiting from the University of Akron. We had 12 participants, and received a lot of feedback from each.  Our play testers all fell into the target audience age range, and had little to no video game experience. Based on this playtest, we are revising our controls slightly and adding more interesting effects to give the world more life.

Our current plan is to deliver a new version to Dr. Holt’s team on Wednesday, when we will have added a new mechanic: capturing enemies. We feel that forcing the player to do more than just shoot is helpful for making the game more interesting, as well as distracting the brain from the implicit learning that is occurring. Dr. Holt will be able to test our theories and we should have a solid idea of if it helps by halves.

We’re in the final stretch now, and everyone’s working hard; expect to see some cool stuff here at the end!

-team neuraltone