Summary of the Week
This was a very busy week for our team. We set a goal to have a playtest with our subject matter experts on the Friday before the ETC Playtest Day on Saturday, so we really pushed ourselves to have a full game so that we could get as much feedback as possible.
Development
This week our programmers started to work on another two key game mechanics in our game. Targy mainly focused on light attraction system and bird collision system and Harry was working on visuals such as the off-path and collision indicator, skybox, path adjustment and ending scene. Because of the time constraints, these new features were roughly implemented and the level is not fully finished, but we had an almost finished gameplay experience before Friday and we looked forward to the playtest by our SMEs.
Art
For this week, artists continued working on the detailed city buildings and adding textures and emissive materials. We also created 3 types of street light models based on the picture reference our subject matter expert provided.
This week we are keeping up with the polishing arts. We replaced street lights and materials and we developed some emissive light materials for the playtest. We also adjusted the light intensity and light color based on what we researched about bad lights and good lights. We tried to make sure everything we did was scientifically accurate because we are having a playtest with our subject matter experts on Friday.
Based on last week’s results, we implemented a new volumetric light for spotlight and point light. We used these fake volumetric lights to teach the player of light range. The fake volumetric light is using a static mesh and a customized transparent shader to achieve such an effect.
Subject Matter Expert Playtest
To help prepare for the ETC Playtest Day, we set up a playtest session with our subject matter experts, Jon Rice and Diane Turnshek. This was a great opportunity to get their feedback on the issues we are trying to address with the bird migration and dark skies. From their feedback we found that we needed to change the direction of the Milky Way, how the night sky appears when the guest enters the city, add in more skyglow and light clutter (signs, traffic lights, etc.), change the light to a more blue light, add more bird types at the end and to take away about 25% of the birds caught in the light beam. We feel confident that we are on the right track and feel that we will be able to address these in the next week.
ETC Playtest Day
The ETC Playtest Day was very successful. We originally thought we would only be playtesting with adults, so we were surprised that most of the groups in the morning had a lot of children. Everyone seemed to really enjoy the experience though, but since the ending scene was still being worked on and the music not yet implemented, the guest seems to focus more on how beautiful the birds looked in the light instead of how tragic it is. This was one of our main takeaways on what we need to work on and another issue was that the arrow that showed the guest their direction confused some of the older guests. They thought the arrow was telling them where to go so we made a note to eliminate this feature. Overall we feel like the feedback was positive, but we know we have a lot to work on to make sure we hit our transformational goals.
What went well
This week went really well for our team. We hit our goals that we set to have completed for the playtest and were able to get a lot of feedback from our guests and our subject matter experts. Overall the feedback was positive and any issues that arose were items that we feel can be addressed within our timeline.
Next Steps
Right now we know that we want to eliminate are the arrows that show direction, implement the sound and work on finalizing the ending. Next week we will evaluate the feedback we received from the ETC Playtest Day and from our SMEs to determine what we should address or what features we should eliminate or add to help us determine our focus for the next few weeks.
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