Week 11

Hello and welcome to our weekly newsletter. With a new direction and a lot of tech changes, our team had to make a lot of updates to our design. The experience we are working towards comprises of

1. Command and Delegate: Get the AI to fetch certain objects for you
2. Teach an AI: Teach the AI about different objects in game
3. Learn from an AI: Learn from the AI who to serve the order to

Now, staying true to the job of discovering how to teach, we are using foreign fruits for the customers. We are still considering our customers – Aliens or Robots. We setup our final sprint.

FINAL SPRINT PLAN

1. Design:
   1. Formulate a layout for the experience in beats
   2. Design a flow of the experience based on
      1. Dialogues
      2. Physical Interactions
   3. Flush out all the systems in play
   4. Layout for UI
   5. Level Design
2. Programming:
   1. Continue working on –
      1. Text to Speech
      2. Voice Inputs
   2. Developing the demo based on design
3. Art:
   1. Model, texture the AI character
   2. Work with Designers for Room Layout and UI elements
   3. Additional Art assets

DESIGN DOCUMENTS:

Basic Gameplay Loop 

Progression System

Dialogue Tree + Flow

Sample Score Card

Based on these, our team progressed to develop Phase I and Phase II of the experience. For now considering the time constraints for the progression system, we will only be focusing on developing the complexity in terms of fruits, not the Aliens / Robots. It’s definitely turning out to be a diner dash like experience using voice.

We are working heavily in the dialogue department, with our designers working with Api.ai to map out possible dialogues to keep the user going through the experience without breaking it by asking random things. Next week our goal will be to hold internal tests on the demo, before going for a public playtest.

SOUND NEEDS:

At the start of the week, we were not sure about our sound needs, considering its a voice first experience we needed to make sure we don’t go for a BGM for now until we test out the experience. But might end up hiring a sound designer in the future for it. We will be adding some SFX for feedback whenever the player interacts with the environment or the AI.

GOING FORWARD:

We will have more to share in the coming week. Our goal will be to polish the existing experience, playtest and iterate the demo and hopefully add Phase III with or without the complexity of Alien/Robot types.

Thanks for tuning in, we will have more updates the coming week.