Quarters
We officially one quarter of the way through the semester, so we spent the majority of this week preparing for our Quarters Presentation on Friday the 27th. Throughout the week, we worked on constructing a new build of the game so we had something new to demo for our audience. We added a simple level to the build of the game that includes preliminary islands and obstacles for the player to navigate around and more a sophisticated AI system to have pirate ships go after the guest while merchant ships sail away. Several iterations on the UI have also been made to make it easier for the player to see how to interact with during the game. All of these elements were combined on Thursday night so that we an up-to-date version of the game to demo after the presentation.
The presentation itself went quite well. We each did an exemplary performance on stage with our respective parts, and we handled the Q&A session as well as one could have hoped. There were questions raised by attendees about the long-term objective of the project EA has in mind, but members of the OCCO team who came down to watch stated that they themselves were still considering what direction they will take after this semester is over, and that this is indeed merely a proof of concept. Once the presentations were over, we held a demo session where we received valuable feedback about how to handle our game in the coming weeks. The main critique we got was our UI was not as intuitive as it could have been. Many wanted to click on the ship directly to make a path and then use a tablet-based gesture to attack, like tracing a circle around an enemy. We will take this feedback and consider new UI designs next week so that our gameplay is more intuitive and fun for our players.