For week 7, we had our half presentation on Wednesday (recording and slides). Having fixed the network problem last week, programmers and designers focused on polishing the existing physics and also tweaking the teleport system. We conducted extensive internal playtesting and recorded and edited our most satisfying rally to a video showcase our progress.
Presentation
We started our presentation by showcasing the demo video, so that the faculty have a clearer vision of the different systems in the game. The top left and top right corners show our first-person views respectively. And the bottom view is recorded by a camera shooting from up top.
We then proceeded to talk about the efforts we made to learn more about this sport from all possible angles, and the research we’ve done on existing VR racket sports.
We emphasized our design choices by breaking down the game into different parts. Chao talked about the ball physics and all the mathematical calculation when paddles interacting with the ball. He also introduced the teleport system and how our net mode / regular mode deal with the situation that players wants to rush to the net and give the opposing team pressure.
We then moved on to Pulei talking about our art direction. Shiyong talked about the challenges that we faced, including how we overcame the synchronization of the ball and how testing could be a major source of main in a multiplayer game.
Lastly, Aiden wrapped up the presentation by introducing our time schedule for the rest of the semester and several main features we wished to deliver by the end of the semester.
Faculty Feedback
We received the faculty’s feedback by the weekend. Overall, faculty are pretty satisfied with the team’s progress as well as the logical flow of our presentation. Mike and Washington are specifically interested in the design details of the teleport system and provide a lot of insightful feedback on that.
We also received some concerns regarding the doubles mode, especially given the context that the team will be out for the GDC next week. We had several conversation about this among the team and also with Jonathan. We decided that we still want to hold this decision until the playtest day (Apr 1st), and we’ll make the decision of whether or not we should cut the doubles mode and keep polishing what we already had based on how the playtesting goes.