This week we had our soft opening! Our team went on Wednesday so we implemented some art and got to show it off right away! During Softs we got some great feedback on our narrative, UI, and sound, and for the rest of the week we focused on creating assets and implementing some changes to answer the feedback we got. Lastly we went over our plan for finals next week and scoped our time so that each member of our group could not only work on our finals slides, but also work on the final touches they wanted to implement to the cabinet/game before we presented.
What we added:
Before softs we updated a bunch of our backgrounds. We are currently finishing up some NSFW CGs that we intend to have implemented next week so look forward to those. (still not sure if I am supposed to censor them)
Before:
After:
Softs/Feedback:
The main three areas we got feedback are in our narrative, UI and our sound design. I’ll quickly go over some of the pros and cons of our feedback below to fill you in for when I go over our plan later.
Narrative:
Pros:
– Intriguing
– Has some funny moments
Cons:
-Too long
-Intro is confusing (we didn’t get in the tutorial that we intended to)
The main critique we got was that there was too much narrative between each round of pinball
and that our narrative is mostly worldbuilding so there wasn’t anything within the first day of the experience that could hook a players interest.
UI:
Pros:
-Most people could read the text
-Most people understood which character was talking
Cons:
-We didn’t have a way to tell players if the flippers were active or disabled
-We didn’t have any UI on how to navigate our dialogue
-We didn’t have anything on the physical board that would let players know when they had fully leveled up their ball
As a team most of the UI feedback was something we were prepared to hear, as we did to prioritize our physical machine getting built over our game, although I do regret not putting in any temporary UI assets earlier in the semester.
Sound Design:
Pros:
– The music we had sounded great!
– Hearing the characters talk was funny
Cons:
-Not enough sounds when the ball was hitting things during play
-The music would stop playing after the first break
Most of the sounds we had were in but not all of them and the audio feedback during rounds wasn’t enough to let players know what was going on without looking at the screen which was hard to do whilst playing. As for the broken sounds, we later found out that our FMOD package had been installed incorrectly and it would be a quick fix so that’s was good!
The Plan:
Everyone: Work on Slides
Adeline+Nightray: Add lights and bunny ears
Enn: Create a tutorial/intro animation
Yifan: Assist Enn with putting the rest of our assets in
Nina: Work on UI and focus on slide flow
Below you can find a few photos that represent the teams mental state going into the week before finals. Wish us luck. – Nina
