Week 12 marks the last week before Softs, the theoretical done point of the project.
Design
For design the week started off meeting with game designer Chris Bell, who tore apart our pitch one last time before Softs. Many of the comments echoed what Jesse set just 4 days prior – it was easy to imagine the mechanics, but they didn’t imply enough depth to make 10 hours of gameplay with them. Music as a mechanic is cool, but the player would want to be expressive, which isn’t reflected in the current design. In addition to the problem with the current player story example, Chris pointed out a number of things that could also be improved about our pitch, including presentation flow, slide visual layout, and in general find ways to inject life in the pitch.
Lochlan also consulted with Dave Culyba about how to tell the player story in a more engaging manner. The way Dave put it, what the team had was like a dish recipe – it showed what went into the design, but it wasn’t the dish description that made you want to order that dish. The current pitch lacked evocative imagery that brought out the strength of this concept. In addition, the addition of stakes helped set up the rest of the presentation, but lacked drama that made the listener care. Another way that Dave suggested that the team think about the pitch was like a movie trailer. With this feedback, Ryan and Lochlan iterated on the pitch narrative for the duration of the week.
While Lochlan refined the pitch, Justin furthered progress with the whiteboxing, which would replace the current visualizations in the player story.
Lochlan and Justin made sure to communicate effectively the parts that were needed for the pitch visualization in order no to overscope the magnitude of whiteboxing work that needed to be done.
Art
This week saw Joy wrapping up work on the player 3D model. Not only was there finalization of the main 3D model, but also the rigging of specifically a pair of arms to help illustrate the moment of song playing.
Meanwhile, Harry and Yifan continued to work on pitch visuals. Harry finished the 3D visualization of corruption and moved to assist slide layout, while Yifan worked on a final piece of 3D concept art to depict the lung interior.
