Playtesting

Almost There
This week, the team picked up the pace for a one-and-a-half week sprint into Softs next week. Merging and troubleshooting are the current state of affairs, and the frequency of bugs, memory leaks, and inter-team communications has increased.

Content
Since converting our intro level into an xml file that we successfully read last week, this week, the rest of our already designed levels have also been converted to xml files. During the week, testing revealed some discrepancies between how our program was reading the files and how our designer had written them, but once revealed, this was quickly resolved. We are now in the process of implementing the level select menu to access all of the levels, but otherwise, the levels look promising and fun. Even the team hasn’t tried all of them, yet!

Programming
The importance and frustration of last week continued this week for our programmers.
The menu/UI, in-game line-drawing, and musical notation conversion systems in their individual Git branches were all merged on Monday. Bugs and communication both resulted out of necessity.

Through diligent individual work as well as cooperative work, our programmers have been tackling many issues that have been open since last week or that had just cropped up this week:

  • an outstanding issue with irregular smoothing of our drawn line
  • problems with the level selection system’s subview release
  • extra lines, showing time signature, problems with ties in our musical notation
  • sequencer moving too quickly and calling channels too soon
  • memory leaks

Fire-fighting has been a stressful process, especially since both the causes and solutions to a problem can be completely unclear; however, our programmers consistently solve a great deal of them and the team is supportive.

Playtesting
he team had a playtest this Wednesday with guests – girls, 9 and 11-years-old. We were excited to showcase a new level design as well as all of our features together for the first time. They enjoyed the ease of use and figured out our UI, even though we had not yet implemented our interactive tutorial. In addition, we had internal testing with a couple of our peers here at ETC-SV as well, and they were able to promptly discover a new bug.

Looking Forwards
This Saturday, some members of the team will attend CMU’s Carnival West where we hope that CMU alumni and their families will give us more feedback about our app.

Next week, the team will lock down our current build and debug all current functions in preparation for Soft Opening on Wednesday. After that, we will look ahead at adding the other planned features such as the interactive tutorial.

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