Week 8: The Inbetween

Week 8 is an interesting week, because we’re inbetween Spring Break and GDC. GDC is stands for the Game Developers Conference. It is massive event where people from around the world come together to show what’s up can coming in the game industry. 4/6 of our team members are going to attend which means little work will be done week 9.

This week is meant to set strengthen our core game loop so that when we come back, we will be refining and interating on already established systems. We had hoped to have a playtest this week as well, but unforuntately, we could not confirm the scheduling.

Feedback from Havles:

We are fortunate enough to have received glowing remarks from halves. Our live demo went well and the faculty were very impressed with our progress thus far. We did have a little hiccup when we skipped a slide, but we recovered and we are proud of our presentation.

The feedback that we received was to play more attention to customization and how to emerse the player in our world.

Personalizing the Battleground:

So far, we’ve been working with a very generic version of the battleground area, but we want to personalize the area to make itfeel like Fly Gulls territory. We’ve redesigned the textures of the station to be more beachy and chill like Fly Gull’s personality.

We’re also going to implement “interactables” into this scene. Interactables are objects that the player can interact with to gain more information. We’ve designed 3 interactables; french fries, a bicycle, and an advertisement screen. Each interactable will allude to a weakness of Fly Gull’s.

Whenever the player interacts with these objects, they will achieve an “inspiration” that will log into their rap book. We’re trying to teach the player how to win the rap battle by logging topics that will give them more or less points during the battle. Implementing the rap book will be our goals for the rest of the Week 9-10.

The Audience:

Along with the interactables, we are planning on implementing an audience interaction feature. There will be generic audience members chilling in the station before the battle. You can ease-drop on their conversation and hear them gossiping about your opponent, then follow up with a conversation with them. This is again our attempt at giving the player all the information they need to hit the opponent’s weaknesses and cater to the audience preferences. The audience memeber will later boo or cheer during the rap battle when you do talk about something they like/dislike.

User Interface:

Another thing that we are making progress on this week is the UI. We’ve been using placeholder buttons and dialogue boxes to make sure that the features are functional. Now that we are moving forward more with the mechanics and art, it’s time to play more attention to the interface.

Next Steps:

Next week is GDC week, which means progress will be pretty slow, but we will try our best to get going on the next AI opponent and continue to polish the current game loop.