Project Newsletter 8 (10/20 – 10/24)
Week Overview
This week the team spent the beginning of the week focusing its efforts on preparation for the midterm presentation, and utilised the time remaining in the week to work on revisions from the playtest and move forward with backlogged production tasks.
Production
James had outlined the structure for our half semester presentation at the end of last week, and setup time to walk through it with the advisors and receive feedback. At the beginning of this week, James refined his section of the presentation, as well as improving it’s overall appearance and coordinating with the faculty for further feedback. James also allocated time during the week to creating the interior of our arctic outpost.
Design
Christian spent the beginning of the week digging deeper into the playtest results and reviewing the previous week’s analysis to derive condensed takeaways and develop his section of the presentation. In the second half of the week he spent his time working on outlining specifics for the changes to the user interface, as well as tweaks to make in the existing prototype to improve the overall feel.
Art
In addition to completing the polar bear and beginning work on the eider duck model, Eric dedicated time to develop his section of the presentation regarding the art style of the game. Towards the end of the week, he investigated approaches for refining the terrain and settled on a Unity plugin and texture pack that we have requested to purchase. At the beginning of the week Shashank worked on developing his presentation section on the art pipeline and animation challenges. Following the presentation he resumed animating the wolf, and began rigging the polar bear model.
Programming
At the beginning of the week Ken and Levi coordinated efforts to prepare for presenting a demo of our current prototype at halves. Additionally, Levi allocated some time to complete pulling the playtest data from JSON objects and organizing it into a graph to better examine it for relevance. Following the presentation Levi resumed work on a user login and Ken began to work on the adjustments to refine the current prototype.
Next Week
After taking the time to step back and look at our goals and progress so far to prepare for our midterm presentation, the team is excited to get back into full production mode. This week we will be hard at work to include additional animals, content, and meaningful revisions for an upcoming playtest either over the weekend or on Monday.