Summary of the Week
This week we focused on preparing for our halves presentation and we conducted multiple playtests to help us get feedback on our initial development.
Advisor and student playtest visit
We are beginning our testing for the beginning stage of our game where the guest starts off in a peaceful area full of trees and stars and will then come over the hill and see the city. We are currently testing our navigation system and the overall pacing of the game. We really want to make sure that we get these core mechanics right so that the guest doesn’t get motion sickness and can understand what they need to do in the game. This week we had our advisors test the game, as well as some high school students who were visiting the ETC. Overall the feedback we received was positive and they gave us some pointers to think about in terms of route, speed and gameplay feedback.
Organization System
As development ramps up we decided it was time for a better organization system. During the producer’s roundtable we learned about scrum and how it can be a great way to visualize what each team member is doing and help to prioritize tasks so we decided to apply it to our project. By breaking the work into sprints it seems to help us to visualize how exactly we are going to achieve those goals and how we will work as a team to get there. It has also been helpful to have a place to store future ideas or ideas that are out of scope but maybe we can revisit if we have time in the future.
Made updates to Transformational Framework
As we learned more about the issues affecting birds and light pollution we needed to shift our transformational goals to reflect the new direction of our game. For example, when we first developed out transformational framework we were focused on getting people to switch off their lights at their homes, but once we decided to focus on how lights from the city affect bird migration, it no longer made sense to focus on lights in the suburbs but to focus on how city lights affect birds.
Development
Before halves, we think we need to have our most important features in our game, which are path routing and player control. Our programmer Harry was working on the routing system and Targy took responsibility for the bird control system. Fortunately, we have prototypes of them before halves, so that we were able to get them playtested by our advisors. Here are some Screenshots about two systems:
Art
In preparation for the halves presentation, our artist, Anlan, rendered some concept art so that we can demo them in our presentation. These images also work as our art direction guide. We want to highlight the light that is still on when the sky is dark. Combining this with the perspective of birds, we hope that players can feel how the grand Pittsburgh skyline can cause birds to lose their way and eventually die of tiredness. Here are the concept art below:
Meeting with Games for Change
For our meeting this week we presented our production timeline. Preparing this timeline really helped our team to visualize where we are in our development process and it helped us to realize how much spring break, SXSW and GDC conferences were going to affect our schedule. This has helped us to take a realistic approach to our scope and will help to act as a guide as we move forward.
What went well
We really got a better understanding of what our schedule looks and where we might encounter some issues. We are doing a good job of finding the best way to organize our tasks as we move forward with our development and this is helping us to be realistic about our scope. The feedback we received during playtesting this week was very encouraging and will help motivate us moving forward.
Next steps
Our halves presentation is next week so we will continue to prepare for it. We will also continue to do follow-ups with contacts about setting up more playtests outside of the ETC.
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