Summary:
This week (Apr.4-10) is another short week followed by CMU Carnival. Trying to solve the design problem where players are not enjoying the puzzle phase, we are switching up some mechanisms and moving forward with a more complete product.
What we have done:
Client and Instructor Meeting (Apr.5)
This week’s client and instructor has been combined into one for the sake of CMU Carnival from Thursday. It is suggested that we conduct another public playtest on Wednesday during Graduate Student Appreciation Breakfast from 9:30am to 10:30am.
Playtest at Graduate Student Appreciation Breakfast (Apr.6)
CMU has a tradition for Graduate & Professional Student Appreciation Week early April. ETC also provided breakfast for the celebration to all the students in the program. We took the chance to playtest with more than a dozen students together. The activity exposed some other technical problems but sparked some conversations among players.
Team Bowling (Apr.6)
Yes, we went bowling!
Project Management
The tasks were being completed as planned, but our team was concerned about the fun aspect of the product. There could be another extension for Alpha, if we decided to change up some major mechanism. Considering we are one month away from delivery, most of Beta will focus on updating UI, importing art assets, and fixing technical issues.
Programming
One of the most important problems from last week was the server capacity, which kept us from playtesting with over 10 people at one time. The problem has been solved once Shicai migrated from the online server, Glitch, to the ETC server provided by our IT staff. A stress test of 80 players was made possible this Tuesday by randomly generating bots. The server capacity issue has not come up this week and we aim to do another stress test of around 500 players during Week 12.
A facilitator guide and wrap-up report has been drafted and implemented into the gameplay, completing the product from start to finish (demo attached).
Art/UI/UX
One of the changes we made after Playtest Day on Apr.2 was to make the culture wheels more lively, by adding a face to it. Some of the face designs, drawn by Amber, are shown below (images attached). The inspiration is from Trivial Quest.
After puzzle solved, an animation will play. An loading animation has also been created by Amber to accommodate the potential loading time (gifs attached).
Puzzle Solved Animation by Apr.4 
Loading Animation by Apr.6
More iterations on culture wheels’ colors have been added by Amber and different color palettes could be used under different themes.
A first draft of page layout for wrap-up reports is also created by Alexa as below (screenshot attached). The length of the report will be trimmed down for better readability.
What we plan to do:
We are close to delivery but at a very critical point. Meetings will be held with faculty and clients to see we can still add simple fun elements to the activity.
