A majority of our week was focussed on preparing for Lumberjam, which our team would be hosting over the weekend. At the beginning of the week, however, we had our Soft Opening, where we briefly got to discuss our game demo with the ETC faculty, while getting guidance towards improving the build for the end of the semester.
After Soft Opening, the team began creating plans for Lumberjam. Lumberjam was essentially our answer to feedback we had received early on in the semester about playtesting documentation. We decided to host a small workshop, where participants are given a few exercises, along with our documentation (plus Amazon’s official documentation), to see how far they could go. At the end of the Lumberjam, we would provide them with a survey, which was focussed on extracting useful data points to iterate on our technical documentation.
At the Lumberjam, we had a total of 11 participants, many of them ETC students. We did, however, also have a couple of Computer Science Undergraduate Seniors in attendance as well. There was a vast range in terms of ability and experience in the room, which gave us a variety of data points on our end survey. Using all the information we received, we would be able to talk about it further in our Final Presentation, while seeking out useful data points to help with iteration on our documentation.
With this semester almost coming to an end, there’s few gameplay-related assets that we are able to create at this point. We started to finalize our game by adding and changing the positions of lights, for example, adding more lights in the bottom left corner and the alley so that players can notice this path option more easily. We also created and added some buildings in the distance to create a background that our environment fits in with. We have also tweaked some small things to enhance gameplay, for example, movement speed, attack animation, mechs attacking particle effects and etc..
This week in tech, we have pretty much reached a state of completion in our game and only focussing on bug fixes. We had softs openings this week followed by LumberJam over the weekend. This week was mostly spent preparing for LumberJam. We had ETC students come in to learn and create something in Lumberyard using our resources. We gave them a list of tasks they were supposed to do. The first and major one was playing around with EMotionFX (the animation system) in Lumberyard. We provided them with all they assets they needed to create their own animation state machines for character. It was very pleasing to see most people be able to get through that task (with our support). From the session we received a lot of encouraging remarks about our documentation as well as some helpful feedback that we plan on incorporating into our documentation next week.