Week 13 marked the final stretch of development, beginning with Soft Opens on Monday and concluding with the Alumni Project Showcase. Across both events, the team focused on stabilization, clarity, and preparing the experience for external audiences.
Soft Opens Feedback
During Soft Opens, the project received strong engagement from faculty, particularly around the complexity of the system design and the layered decision-making mechanics. While players were able to engage with the core loop, feedback continued to emphasize the importance of reducing cognitive load and simplifying card interactions, especially in relation to readability and system clarity.
This reaffirmed ongoing priorities around:
- Reducing overall card count and complexity
- Improving UI clarity and pop-up readability
- Ensuring core systems remain understandable in a short play experience
System Refinement and Final Adjustments
Throughout the week, the team focused on final adjustments to stabilize the build:
- Card system balancing continued, with adjustments made to reduce the number of active cards in circulation
- Mingrui updated question and narrative configurations directly within the project to support clarity and pacing
- Haru focused on improving the UI pop-up system and fixing remaining interaction bugs, particularly around card selection and display behavior
- Junru supported remote testing and implementation support, working on scripting for event-driven systems such as day transitions and animation triggers
A key technical focus was implementing a more structured event system, allowing changes in game state (such as day progression) to reliably trigger animations and UI updates.
Alumni Project Showcase
The week concluded with the Alumni Project Showcase, where the team presented the project to visiting alumni. This provided an opportunity to demonstrate the current state of the game and gather final-stage feedback from external viewers.
Overall, feedback was constructive and helped reinforce both the strengths of the project—particularly its ambitious systems and narrative framing—as well as remaining areas for refinement around clarity and onboarding.
Week 13 served as a transition point from development into presentation, focusing on stabilization, simplification, and communication of the core experience as the project moved into its final showcase phase.