Summary

We are back from spring break and we have really hit the ground running this week. We focused on solidifying our core for the game, which meant making sure the questions were in a good spot. The programmers have continued to tackle the networking so the players are connected and the artists have determined the best path forward so that they are able to stay within scope. 

Game Questions

This week we met with Geoff Kaufman, who is the Associate Professor of Human-Computer Interaction & Ph.D. Program Director to discuss our questions and their relation to Dual Process Theory. Our teammate CiCi learned this theory as a student in his class and he was extremely helpful in answering our questions. He gave us some excellent feedback on some changes we could make to improve the questions to help us to reach our goals, but overall he felt that our idea was strong which gave us confidence that we are heading in the right direction. He has agreed to review our questions as we move forward in our project and we are very grateful to have his help.

Art

This week we decided to change the 3D option objects all into 2D to ensure we finish the production on time. Since we plan to have 4-6 objects per question it just made sense that we should change to this direction so that the artists have the ability to work on other tasks such as the environment and interactions. At the end of the week, we finished all the 2D assets for level 1 questions and we also made the character animations and character rigging work. We will soon configure out the procedural animation there.

UI

For the UI, we have added a background and buttons that fit that have a fun aesthetic. The level 1 is now complete in Figma and ready for the programmers to put them into Unity. 

Design

We have started to think about how we can break down each level and what kind of challenges we can add to make it engaging. For our second and third level we took inspiration from 3D Pinball and decided to implement separate levels using the bouncing acceleration mechanics. We feel that a feature like this will encourage the players to collaborate more in order to help them avoid these obstacles. Now that the basic idea has been put together we are going to focus on more detailed and polished blockouts to be implemented next week.

Tech

In our latest development update, we’ve successfully deployed the game demo onto mobile devices, introducing a joystick-based character control system for enhanced player interaction and immersion. Additionally, we’ve implemented a lobby system on our server, which efficiently organizes players into groups and initiates distinct game sessions, streamlining the multiplayer experience. 

Conflict: Every step has some problems(build problem, apple certification problem, Network API updates that crashes the game, etc)

Next Steps

We plan to implement the basic UI question part to the room phase into Unity and the improve lobby with name input and ready phase. We also plan to make progress on the environmental art and begin work on phase 2 and 3 of questions