Hello!
This week (spanning from April 11th to April 15th) was our last week before our Softs presentation. This meant our primary goals for this week were Polishing our Game, Polishing our Website, and Preparing our Final Vision.
Polishing our Game
We have known for a while the shape we wanted our game to be in for Softs, which should essentially be completely finished. We wanted to strive for having no more outstanding plans to iterate on the project because we believe Softs will 100% give us feedback to iterate on. If we had to contend with wanting to do a large number of additional changes on top of faculty feedback, there is no way we could get even close to doing everything. We initially scoped with the idea that the Softs feedback would be essential to how we close out the project. In recognition of how important showing off our game was going to be, we decided to run a few playtests of our pre-Softs build on Friday April 15th. These playtests went simultaneously very well and very poorly. A variety of bugs and issues popping up meant that we certainly had work to do, but all of the work felt like cleanup work more than anything to derail our existing plans. Some of the aspects that we began to work on based on that feedback included features like allowing players to reconnect to our game in the event they get kicked out, more feedback to ensure players knew which character they were, and additional UI polishing. Featured below are some of the new or polished assets from this past week (including our most recent version of our Fabric Guidebook!):
Polishing our Website
We have been constantly developing our website (shifting pages, uploading media, etc.). This next week will feature a large update to the website, which will include the trailer for our project. The trailer is still a work in progress, so I will not be featuring any of it here. I expect the next post will feature the full trailer. We have also been sowing the seeds of what our final website will look like, specifically referring to create links/pages to the resources we expect to leave behind on this project. We now have a page dedicated to the Material Guidebook and to Terra Thrift itself (which by the way is the name we have decided to give to our game, which I will go into more detail about in the next section.) These resources will continue to be updated until the project is completed, but having example pages will be beneficial for laying out what it will eventually look like.
Preparing our Final Vision
This was our way of saying, “Let’s figure out what the end of the semester will look like AND what the Games For Change Festival should look like as well.” For starters, we wanted to differentiate between our project team (ECHO) and the game we are making (Terra Thrift). We felt this increased clarity as to how we were able to discuss and separate the two. We chose the name Terra Thrift to be very direct in saying that the game is about a thrift store and it is very earth conscious.
Next, we continued our efforts into outlining our plans for the festival as much as we are able to. We are still working on the location based experience and exactly what that looks like, but we are close on determining what hardware we will have available to bring to the festival and what other factors we still need to finalize. At this time, I believe the exact dates and room we will be hosting from are still in flux, but we are dedicating some of our time and resources to make sure we are flexible and can work with whatever schedule we receive.
Next week will be relatively hectic. Again it will be our Softs presentation and as of now two of our team members (James and Em) will be attending PAX East as a development opportunity. This means we have decided to frontload the schedule for the week to ensure we can dedicate as much of the team as possible to running/receiving feedback from the presentation.
Thank you for your time, see you in the next blog post.