Project Newsletter 11 (11/10 – 11/14)
Week Overview
The team came out of a productive week, but knew we had to do a lot of work for the coming play test. We traveled on the Friday, and we feel like had another successful playtest with two new groups of students, and two old sets of students.
Production
James started the week with organizing the details with the client for the coming playtest. Moving forward with that, he looked into way we may be able to texture the terrain of the world, and make it look a little neater and the limitations we may face with that.
Design
Obviously the coming playtest meant we needed some way to deduce certain behaviors from the students. Christian outlined certain questions we’d like to ask, and worked out what we’d like to find out besides the obvious. After getting feedback from our advisors, he made some adjustments to it. He also worked out what we may want from the map as well as the day/night cycle, and documented them for the team to use.
Art
Shashank had done some good work in making the rigs for the animals in the previous week. Using all of those, he started painting and animating many of the characters so we could have them in the game that week. We labeled it as a priority to get more animals in, and managed to get those in even with some more limited animations on some than others.Eric had to deal with getting our new terrain available for our game. This would be our final terrain, and he pushed himself to try and get one for us to use the following week. On the Thursday, however, he used most of his time to texture many of the animals shashank had been rigging. This included the polar bear, lemming, eider duck and seal.
Programming
Levi had the previous week implemented his API to register where the students were moving in the world. This he had to tie in with his previous login system for the children, and add in some new UI for the login system. He then worked with Ken to put that into the game. He also started work on the day/night cycle, and researching how best to implement that.
Ken started his week working from a bug list, and correcting many of those. He also had to adjust the movement of the joystick, to snap to the user’s finger and make the sneaking mechanism, trigger when in the circle, against walking outside of the circle. Adding all the animal info into the log book, as well as adding the actual animals came later in the week after they had been animated and textured.
Next Week
We will look at some information from the playtest, and look if we’d like to make adjustments in the coming weeks. We also have the day/night cycle to implement, and to work out just what we’d like to include and maybe cut as we come into the last couple of weeks of the semester.
