We started the week with an instructor meeting. The meeting with our instructors helped confirm that we are headed in the right direction. We hashed out what each team member is working on and came up with a goal to have a playable version of our experience by the end of next week. What this means for us is having a specific demo made with some new art assets and utilizes the drag & drop feature as well as the narrative node feature.
To meet this goal, Xiao has transitioned to building out the story she developed last week in Roblox using our current iterations of the drag and drop asset tool.
We also had a meeting with Stone Librande to discuss his experience working on Spore: Galactic Adventures, one of our reference games. He gave us some good advice on simplifying our design and explained how his design team approached the challenges inherent to branching narrative. We discussed some of their solutions as a team and determined that a “decision currency” system could be a plausible solution for our tool if students are making experiences that expand too much to manage. This currency would function so that adding more choices to a decision node costs more, but every user starts with the same amount of currency. Our client seemed intrigued by this idea, so we’re currently keeping this feature in our back pocket.
Anlan and Lyn continued to build out our Progressive Era asset package. They colored and textured the factory they modeled last week. They also completed a boat and some townhouses. Additionally, they finished up our poster and half-sheet.
Rohit worked on importing the new art assets into his drag and drop inventory system.
Chenguang has been working hard on the dialogue node system. Currently he’s been hard coding dialogue options into experience, but has set up the code so that self written dialogue will be able to be entered in a player facing UI. He was able to present this demo to Roblox at our client meeting this week.
Gillian has spent the week building the website and revising our project description and goals.
The team also took a new team photo featuring our Roblox avatars.
Next week we will collectively begin preparing for half presentations and focus on our personal tasks. Rohit will start to focus on a saving & loading feature so that students can build narratives across multiple sessions. Chenguang will continue working on the dialogue node system to give it multi-NPC functionality and player-facing UI. Anlan and Lyn will continue to make more environmental assets. Xiao plans on continuing to build out our Homestead Strike demo. Gillian will start planning playtesting.