This week, we have made a lot of progress development wise in preparation for the ETC Playtest Day on Saturday. Despite being a really difficult process, we have successfully made a build that includes the dialogue system and player interaction and used it in our playtest. Our faculty advisor also came in and playtested our experience and provided valuable feedback.
Tech Update
This week we successfully integrated our dialogue system and player interaction into our game. Players can enter the game, then pick up the wallet, then talk to the NPCs using the our dialogue system, and lastly return the wallet.
Production
This week we started with a very ambitious production plan. At the beginning of the week, we planned for having the dialogue, tutorial and ending to be done, with dialogue being the most important. After a day or two, the team found some of the tasks to be particularly challenging. Halfway through the sprint, we realized that we are not going to finish everything that we planned for. We decided to cut the beginning and the end of the game from this sprint in order to prioritize player interaction and dialogue so that it can be tested with naïve players. We learnt that hard deadlines will affect how you prioritize within a sprint: on one hand, if there are naïve guests playing your experience at the end of the sprint, we have to prioritize the interaction; on the other hand, having these hard deadlines push the team to work harder and getting things done more quickly.
Meeting with Faculty Advisor
This week, our faculty advisor, John Dessler, came in and played with our experience. He gave a lot of useful feedback focusing on the narrative and the dialogue. This advice helps us make the game more intuitive.
ETC Playtest Day
On Saturday, 13 naïve guests came to our project room and playtested our experience. Although not every playtest went smoothly due to technical difficulties, our playtesters thought our experience has great potential in being useful in the future.
Agenda for next week
- Character modeling, rigging and animating
- Build tutorial
- Build SUDS