Newsletter #16

Revised Seven Springs environment

The weekend and early part of this week included the integration of some final polish to the art. We’ve redone the background for our Seven Springs environment. In the previous version, the trees obscured the resort building. For the new version, we pushed the trees to the back and redrew some layers to make a new composition that better showcases the resort building itself.

Revised obstacles

We’ve redrawn our obstacles to make them pop more from the background. Making the obstacles easy to see is an important part of making the game playable.

Polish, polish, polish

We’ve revised the UI assets used in the tutorial to be clearer and more polished, we put the finishing touches on our slope textures, and we had one last art hurrah by making our menus animated. The pause and death menus now slide onto the screen as sheets of ice, and as for the main menu — well, we’ll let you download the game when it comes out and see for yourself! These finishing touches make the game look very professional.

OpenFeint Support

We’ve added OpenFeint support for Android devices. Since Android does not have GameCenter, which is made by Apple, OpenFeint gives us an equivalent service for leaderboards and achievements. While we were at it, we also tweaked some achievements to better match the game’s flow after all the adjustments we’ve been making to find the right difficulty curve.

And the Semester Draws to a Close…

Our team gave our Final Presentation on Wednesday, May 9th. It will be another couple days before we hear back with final faculty feedback, but the reception we received the day of the presentation was very positive. The crowd smiled and even laughed with delight during the demo, which is always a good sign.

The day after our final presentation our team went out for a team dinner and a movie to celebrate the completion of our game and enjoy each other’s company. Here’s some photos from Yokoso Japanese Steakhouse. Kanpai!

What’s Next

Now it’s time to hand off our files to our client, who will handle the publishing and marketing of our game. This has been a truly delightful semester with a great team and a supportive client relationship. We’re proud of our work and excited to share it with the public.

From of all of us on the Spring Entertainment team, thanks for reading and sharing our semester’s journey with us. On to the next great adventure!