At the very end of last week, one of our artists presented drafts for our half-sheet and logo at a workshop and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive! This was a great step for establishing the aesthetic going forward in this project. However, there wasn’t a lot of time to enjoy our success. Week 3 was It Takes Two Alices’ Quarters presentation! Based on our feedback last week, we created a revised presentation that focused more on a level prototype. We walked faculty through the level step by step to give them an understanding of what gameplay will look and feel like.
Feedback was positive overall. The biggest critiques were concerns that we are not using the Tilt Five to its fullest potential. The Tilt Five is great at presenting 3D Visuals on the board. Our prototype was presented on a flat screen, and we made little mention of how the 3D would be used specifically to improve puzzle-solving.
We had a lot of discussion about this afterwards. Balancing using the Tilt Five’s 3D, creating good puzzles, and being educational for new programmers is an extremely challenging design problem. We are still in the process of solving this conundrum, but at the moment we are trying to focus on designing educational puzzles, and once we are confident in that we can start looking into using the 3D element.
The programmers developed the code architecture we’ll be using going forward, and the designers started brainstorming to create levels beyond our prototype.
All in all, it’s a good thing that our core gameplay is relatively set in stone, because it allows us to move ahead with other aspects of development. However, there are a lot of challenges ahead, especially surrounding design.
Next week, we hope to have a complete prototype for the level we presented at Quarters, as well as 3 or so more levels designed on paper.