Summary of the Week
This was an extremely busy week preparing for our halves presentation, visiting the natural history museum, Frick park and also making a plan for the next 3 weeks while our team is gone for spring break and conferences.
1/2s presentation
The majority of the week was spent preparing for our halves presentation. We divided up slides amongst the team, each person taking on explaining the section of the game they’ve been working on. We focused on making sure we clearly presented our high purpose and that we incorporated the transformational framework throughout our presentation. We addressed the reasoning behind each gameplay decision and how it related back to our goals. We shared where we are on our development and a timeline of our future plans as well as the playtesting we hope to schedule in the next coming weeks. Overall our team felt like we did a great job preparing and delivering our presentation. We did receive some questions about the birds that we didn’t know the answer to, but after meeting with our SME we feel like we can now address these questions in the future.
Carnegie Museum of Natural History Meeting
After our presentation we met with Jon Rice at the museum where he gave us a tour of the bird collections. He showed us the types of birds that are typically found in Pittsburgh as well as the known super colliders, which are birds that are most commonly found in the city streets from building collisions. Having the opportunity to see these birds up close really helped our team to have a deeper connection with our subject and allowed us to have a clear visual of what the bird flock might look like. After the collections tour we were able to share our game development with Jon to get feedback on the accuracy of our gameplay. His feedback was that we were on the right track and that our planned levels would help make a game that would create a strong emotional connection. We invited him to help us playtest at the end of March and he is really looking forward to it.
Miro board
The next few weeks will be taken up with spring break and conferences so it was essential that we make a plan that can be easily followed no matter where the team is. This is why we decided to make a Miro board. By using Miro, we were able to make our scrum board virtual and to help eliminate any confusion on what task is due and whose task it is.
Visited the Frick
Diane mentioned that the World Migratory Bird Day event held at the Frick Park Environmental Center would also be an excellent place to share our game so she helped put us in touch with Stephen Bucklin who works there. We traveled to Frick Park to meet up and discuss the event and our game.. Stephen was really interested in our game and we made plans to share our game after its completion on May 13th at the event.
Development
Because we mainly focused on presentations, we didn’t have any new features added this week. Our programmers worked with our Artists to try to merge everything we got to create a prototype scene and playthrough. We create a rough path based on the bird’s actual migration direction. And added a simple bird flock for the player following.Here are some screenshots of our prototype scene:
What went well
This week we had a lot of big goals from our presentation to planning the next 3 weeks. We did a great job of breaking everything down into manageable steps and worked really well as a team to get everything done. Everyone left for break feeling like we were in a great place in our development and that we had a solid plan moving forward.
Next Steps
Our next steps are broken down into one sprint that will be completed over the next two weeks. The main goal is to get to feature complete for a SME playtest as well as the playtest day on April 1st. We are also hoping to establish more playtests outside of the ETC.
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