Our first day back from our spring break started with some great news! With the help of ETC staff member John Balash, we scheduled an in-person playtest with Assemble’s after-school program next week. The after-school program will have kids ages 8 to 12, right within our target age range. Consequently, our goal for this week was to have a playable build of our game to support our playtest.
Simulation Stage
One of our core goals for this week was to have a concrete design of our final simulation stage. Designing the train’s path turned out to be a challenge, as our team doesn’t have a strong background in level design or rail design. Since our track features different levels of elevation it was difficult to visualize using just paper. To solve this issue, our designers used Roller Coaster Tycoon to genearlly map out the branching paths of the landscape. Descriptions of the terrain are included in the image below; different colors indicate different paths.
After planning the environment in Roller Coaster Tycoon, we mapped out the landscape in Maya based on the design. Below is a simulated flythrough of the train path.
MIDI and Unity
In preparation for our playtest next week, we have been hard at work developing physical prototypes. Since our design for the whistle station involves the guest playing a short melody, for our prototype we decided it would be best to use an off-the-shelf MIDI keyboard. Unfortunately, getting the MIDI keyboard to interface with Unity proved to be a challenge, and an issue with a software plugin we tried to install bricked one of our computers. We are still optimistic about our playtest next week, but the loss of half our programming power for a day and a half has really set us back.
Physical Prototype Updates
After reformatting the bricked PC, we got back to work, and successfully have our gear and color stations working very well! By the end of this week we had cardboard stations for all three of our primary interactions and circuitry ready for testing.
