Our Softs presentation with our faculty consultant was at the end of this week, so the team worked hard to get the project ready for this deadline. More art and UI assets were created by our artist, our programmers worked to merge their code and add missing features to the gameplay, and our designer worked on the teacher guide document.
Softs Presentation
We met with John Dessler on Friday, and he was joined by an ETC student to simulate how sixth graders will be paired up to play our game in class. Additionally, we shared the most recent version of the teacher guide with John prior to his visit, so he could give us feedback not only on the game experience but also on the teacher guide itself.
John was incredibly helpful in terms of providing notes and suggestions to the team – he pointed out several things that we can improve on and that require fixing. And though this is great in terms of information, it’s a double-edged sword (as John and everyone in the team recognized), because we only have a week left before we present the final version of our project.
Here’s where we must recognize our shortcomings. The team was pretty good in terms of playtesting initial, rough versions of stages of our game (ex. testing which sensors sixth graders like and understand, testing if players understand devices and obstacles in maze gameplay, testing an early version of Story Mode, etc.). However, we hadn’t tested many of the details in the game that were added for our Softs presentation (such as UI features, narration/dialogue for Story Mode, programming stage features, etc.) – we hadn’t even tested the latest version of the game amongst ourselves, so the first time many of us saw it was alongside John during the presentation. And, truth be told, we were all quick to realize that several things need to be adjusted and fine-tuned.
It was certainly a wake-up call in terms of how much we still need to do for the project. And though the time we have left (only one week!) is definitely daunting, we had to come together as a team and decide to set up better organization, communication, and collaboration strategies to work together in the remaining time so we can end up with a good project, for our client and for ourselves.
We certainly hope we have great news by the end of next week!