Summary

The team is back together again after GDC and we met to evaluate where we were in our development. A lot of progress was made, but we are starting to feel the time crunch, especially with the upcoming ETC Playtest Day. The big accomplishment this week was that we were finally able to share an updated demo that allows the players to herd the chosen objects. Since this is one of the main game mechanics, having this ready to test has helped give the team more confidence in our overall timeline.

Art

This week we made a lot of progress on the 3D art assets. These assets will be placed in the environment to help us to create the theme of an amusement park at your desk.

Design

This week we have put together art assets into the current map. We have also done a playtest at the design collective and got many useful feedback from other members of the event.

Tech

This week we focused on assembling the UI and UX design from figma into Unity. Our hope is to make it look more polished and fit with the design aesthetic, but right now we just want to get everything into place and make sure we have a functioning game.

Our primary objective is to create a UI template that functions locally without relying on a network connection. However, the underlying logic is quite complex. We began by mapping out the inputs and outputs needed to build the framework step by step. We divided the entire discussion phase into several smaller stages: Preparation, question generation, answer explanation, and final result presentation.

Rework AI system to address some problems from playtest: things are not responding to players from time to time

Feedback from the Design Collective 

We brought our herding game to the workshop and invited the other group to test it. We used a method called EOTA (Experience, Observations, Theories, and Advice) introduced by Elaine who is our client. We got some valuable feedback from our playtesters. 

• The camera is too far away so that they can not tell which character it is.
• Some advice on making the mechanism engage more collaborations. Maybe when two players are herding one item, their speed will be faster.
• Why are the portals CD players?
• The playtesters felt it was hard to understand what they should do. So maybe for level one, we delete the barriers and obstacles on the map. Just make it very easy so they know what to do.
• After they get one item herded in the portal, they feel more engaged and want to herd more items. 

Next Steps

Next week we will be preparing for ETC Playtest Day so we are focused on making sure we have the core of our game complete so that we can get proper feedback. The biggest problem we need to solve right now is our networking issue. Once that is in place then we will be able to start playtesting the question phase, which is the main part of our game.