Week 14 is most importantly our last week to fully prepare the game before softs. We started out the week with a meeting with the clients, in which we updated them on the current progress of the game and asked them for a testimonial that we could show the faculty for softs.
We set out at the start of this week with the intention to refine our game as much as possible with input from faculty. This began by getting input from our faculty advisers who pointed out some areas in the tutorial that were worded ambiguously. This input was further confirmed by meeting with Anthony Daniels, who spent the time to lay out every point in our tutorial that was ambiguous or stated more complexly than necessary. He also noted that several of our UI elements were still not reading well, particularly those on the main menu map. He noted that they were not readily identifiable as levels, and in many cases it appeared as though the user may have already completed the level without actually playing the level. He further noted that the level builder tutorial was detailed, but the restrictions that it put on the player were a little annoying. We also noticed through internal playtesting that the placement of several of the checkpoints put the player in very difficult situations if they failed, so we designed a custom placement system for the checkpoints and redesigned the levels to be less difficult for a player to complete after they have fallen off of the map.
We spent the remainder of the week revising the wording of the tutorial and the map UI elements to improve the clarity of the game, and redesigning our levels. We decided that we would not demo the live event system at softs because it requires a significant amount of time to run through the entire live event, and we would rather have the faculty experience all of the other elements of the game. We plan to use Miracast to show our game at softs, so that any faculty who do not feel like playing the game will still be able to see all of the features in real time.