Week 13

Week 13 was really intense week of development and preparations for our Soft Open. It was scheduled at the Microsoft Reactor in San Francisco, a new venture ETC-SV decided to undertake. The reason to do this was to open the projects to the industry, ETC alums, family, and friends. Kudos to Microsoft for lending us the place as the event was really successful and the team had a great time learning and interacting with industry professionals. Soft open is an event where our project teams demo an almost complete game to get feedback.

We have been in a crunch for two weeks, the previous week based on our learnings we focused this week of the sprint on polishing and fixing our demo. We implemented Phase III over the weekend and also worked on implementing the new environment in the game.

A few days before soft we started having issues with latency, and our team worked hard to fix it, but since it was mostly from the server side there was not much we could do. The team worked on reducing the confidence threshold for windows to reduce the latency issue from our end, and that greatly helped our experience.

The next few changes were focused on the UI and UX section, the experience is such that during playtests players keep talking to the developers and forget that whatever they say is used in the experience and ends up breaking the experience. Considering that we intentionally decided to erect some barriers through dialogue to act as blinders for the guests so they stay on track. From the narrative side, we made changes to the dialogue to further clarify the guest role.

Apart from the development, we had an inventory check for the soft as we had to transport the whole equipment to the location and come back once it was done. Theming was important to our team, and we ordered aprons to add to the theme of our experience.

The event was successful and we received a lot of positive feedback, though a lot of players were not able to complete the experience but the ones who did it were really happy. We need to look into the feedback and figure out our plan ahead and polish our experience further for finals. Post soft, we decided to take a break and take a day off on Thursday, while Friday was a field trip for everyone to celebrate a successful soft opening.

Thank you for tuning in, we will have a lot more to share the coming week, where we will go over the feedback we received and jolt down our plan for the final sprint.