Summary
This week we had two teammates attend the Game Developers Conference, but our team planned ahead and made sure to go over our goals for the week and divided up tasks. We did a virtual check in as a team at the end of the week to see where everyone was on their task list and to evaluate where we were with our progress. This helped our team to stay on track and made sure that their absence didn’t affect our progress.
Art
This week we made several models for the theme “the amusement park on desktop”. Originally we planned to have different themes for each phase, but after feedback from our advisor we decided that it was best to stick to a single theme in order to help with scope. For the amusement park at your desk, we thought that this was fun, but also something that goes well with our college student demographic. We have continued to draw inspiration from the Y2K aesthetic.
Question phase
This week we came up with level 2 and level 3 questions for the conversation phase of our game. We also discussed the question options with the artists to see if they are comfortable with the amount of objects they would have to develop for each question. With the switch to 2D, the artists feel that this will be doable.
We were thinking about the suggestions and advice from Professor Geoff Kaufman. He suggests we have one or two questions relating to social bias such as gender bias if we try to reduce people’s system 1 thinking. We thought that was a good suggestion and we would like to design one question based on that. For example, for the first question of level 2, we were thinking of showing all the female scholars for options. When people are thinking about scholars they know, some of them probably recall some male scholars. But after reviewing the options, they may realize that what they thought was based on system 1 thinking. That is a scenario we thought based on breaking people’s system 1 thinking.
Design
For design we have been working on implementing the blockout in Unity. This has allowed us to get in the foundation of the scene and set up the metrics and collisions so that we can do a brief playtest iteration for the next week. We will keep working on the implementation this weekend. The hope is that once this is in place that we will be able to pull from this phase and use it for the foundation of other phases.
Tech
For our tech, we added the character animation and collision to our build. We have name displacement and ready to go function works. This will allow the players to move at their own pace through the tutorial of the game and select when they are ready to play. Currently, we are working on the question phase and getting that implemented. Our goal is to have that ready to playtest at the Design Collective next week and get necessary feedback so that we can make updates for the upcoming ETC Playtest Day.
Game Developers Conference
This week both of our producers attended the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. It was a great opportunity for them to see the new technologies that are being released and to network. It is definitely an interesting time in the gaming industry right now with all the layoffs that have been happening, but overall it was very informative and a great experience. There was also an ETC Alumni mixer, which was great to meet past students and hear about their journey in the gaming industry.
Next Steps
Our team is focused on being prepared for the ETC Playtest Day. Our goal is to have a full level complete that we can build upon for future levels and will also allow us to get great feedback from our playtests. For the next week we will focus on fixing networking bugs and implementing the UI system for our question phase.