This week was a major milestone for our team as we successfully completed our Half Presentation on Monday. Our live demo received positive feedback, affirming the progress we’ve made so far. With this accomplishment, we have now shifted our focus toward planning our next steps to prepare for Playtest Day.

Next Goal: Creating a Complete Experience for Playtest Day

As we move forward, our primary objective is to develop a fully playable experience in time for Playtest Day. To achieve this, we have outlined a clear work schedule spanning Spring Break through Week 9 to ensure a smooth and structured development process.

Technical Enhancements

Jinyi is focusing on refactoring, testing data structures, and implementing grid measurements before Spring Break. Additional improvements include the introduction of new methods for VFX, SFX, movement, and character animation. Editable code blocks are being refined, along with spawn and destroy feedback, and character placement in scenes. Yifan is working on expanding interaction conditions, adding delay functions, and ensuring interactions are more dynamic. The second scene is being made editable, and updates to the interaction script indexing and sandbox environment are planned for final testing in Week 10.

Art & Environment Development

Jia and Zhanqi are creating a sample sandbox scene for client review before Week 8. The goal is to complete two fully designed scenes, a forest and a castle, that maintain a balance between simplicity and clarity, ensuring interactable objects are easy to distinguish. Each sandbox will feature three interactable objects with defined action verbs to encourage player engagement and exploration.

UX & Design Planning

Wendy is leading the design efforts to refine user experience by improving button placement, optimizing user flow, and ensuring object labels are clear and descriptive. The team is also working on a spellbook prompt guide and an asset list book to enhance usability. Playtest planning is scheduled for Week 9, with Eva collaborating to finalize the testing structure and objectives.

Next Steps

With a structured plan in place, the team is focused on refining both technical and artistic aspects of the project. The upcoming weeks will be dedicated to finalizing interactions, improving design elements, and ensuring a polished and interactive experience for Playtest Day. Stay tuned as we push forward toward our next milestone!