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After the busy week in Week 13, now the team entered the finishing stage of the project.

This week, we have been focusing on refining the hardware, getting last pieces in, and fixing small problems that we found out earlier.

We fixed the Violin’s bowing part. Now it’s fixed in place, and there are two neatly trimmed rubber pieces attached. The flipper does not shift any more whiling being bowed, and the enhanced resistance from the rubber tremendously eases player’s bowing behavior. After solving the bowing problem, we sealed the violin’s body.

From the previous playtests, we found out that players didn’t notice the team combo visual feedback because they were too busy focusing on a small part of the UI–the instrument area on their individual track. In order to foster team collaboration by giving the idea of a team combo, we decided to use voiceovers in addition to the visual feedback, so that each player can still looking at a their own track, and all of them will be able to notice the collaboration bonus. This feature is already working in game along with other voiceovers, like individual combo and breaking an individual combo.

We had a lot of small tasks this week to make the game more polished: the hardware buttons are all color coded to match the look in UI; the loading screen became dynamic rather than a still image. We are also lucky enough to have a professional mallet maker friend who offered to make mallets for us. The new mallets clearly make less noise than the original ones. Last but not the least, all the character animations are in game or will be in game real soon.