Summary

This week we have focused on preparing for our halves presentation, but also made sure to continue with our playtesting. It felt like we were finally in a place where we could separate our tasks and everyone could work on getting the first draft of the game together. For our design collective artifact we mapped out the gameplay and then pinpointed what barriers we thought we would encounter to help us to narrow down the direction. From this exercise we were able to identify which questions and mechanics we would like to playtest.

Playtesting

We decided to playtest the new matching feature in our game where the players have to match the answers that were given to the player who chose the answer at the end of the game. We also decided to test having the players choose what they thought the player would pick each round, but this time they had the option to tell why they chose it instead of making everyone take turns. This seemed to produce a more relaxed environment. We also tested out having a time limit of 30 seconds that the player had to fill the time when sharing why they chose their answer and it seems to encourage the players to share more meaningful reasons that they chose their answer. From this we learned that we need to choose questions that allow for more in depth answers though. We are going to take this feedback and continue to playtest different options.

Tech

We have conducted several quick playtests for the herding gameplay with four players offline. Currently, one of the most urgent problems we are trying to solve is how to make the game more collaborative. There are still lots of features that we could improve or implement before the half, for example, the moving path of the objects, the map design, and the detailed mechanics of herding under multiple players.

Art

This week artists recreated the mood board for characters and items based on the new design. After we determined the 4 questions and items needed in the first level—animals, snacks, drinks and seasons, artists made several versions of 2D drafts and started to revise them in more detail. At the end of the week, 4 3D items  in the Animal category in both low-poly and high-poly were made for testing. 

Wireframes

We have created some basic wireframes on Figma with the full game play. According to the user flow, we probably may have to log in/sign up and create character, question phase, and herding phase. Those are the main three phases we have for wireframes. 

Some major obstacles we encountered:

Next Steps:

The playtesting is going really well, but we feel that our questions still need work. It is important that we really get these right in order to encourage the most responses and engagement. From the tech perspective, we are trying to figure out how best bring the players into the same shared space and to separate them players into groups.