Week 12

Week 12

Hi, all

This week, we focused on getting all sound and art assets done so that they can be integrated during the coming week!

Playtest

We participated in the ETC playtest at the end of last week, which provided us some good data moving forward: the drawn art style and the photographic art style are liked equally by our demographic, so we will move forward with a photographic art style since it’s more preferred by the most of our stakeholders.

For the app itself, no kids have trouble going through the whole experience. Also, most kids like the reward activity at the end. All these results show that we are on the right track. We also get some feedbacks on the glitches that we had, we are also focusing on fixing them this week.

Production

On the routine client meeting, we reported our playtest result and showed our clients two demos of possible reward activities to have after all questions are complete. There was a fish-finding activity (using the tap mechanic) and a treasure-hunt activity (using the swipe mechanic).

After meeting with our clients, we identified four items we needed to work on before the experience would be complete:

  1. Integrating the photographic art style
  2. Replacing the drag mechanic with tapping, so that only tapping and swiping would be used during the final experience
  3. Polishing the reward activity preferred by the clinicians (the fish-finding activity)
  4. Designing and implementing the way pediatricians will see children’s scores, including a password system and the actual display of the score

 

Sound

The team worked on getting all the SFXs and soundtrack be ready to be implemented in the application.

For music composing, our team try to stay away from really elaborating the music otherwise it would emotionally engage the children which we don’t want. Therefore, according to the feedback that our instructor gave, we modified the soundtrack to be simple and peaceful.

In addition, all the sound effects were finalized for the implementation. Along with the SFXs, our voice of a finalized script was recorded. There are some modifications that need to be done next week.

Programming

For this week, the main focus of the team is to finish the 2nd prototype of the reward activity which is the treasure hunt, creating the password panel and polishing our main gameplay.

 

For 2nd prototype, we create a game where guests can swipe away sand to reveal hidden chests. Here is a demo video:

Since our client as well as the kids preferred the fish-finding activity, we decided to put our energy more on polishing the 1st reward activity. Since we’re using real photos as the textures of the fish and hence legal use right become a quite important problem. We switched most of the assets in the activity to google images that are labeled for reuse or reuse with modification and their animations as well.

Another important feature we implemented this week is a password protected result screen. The idea was to prevent the children or their parents from viewing the clinical score based on the responses. The score is accessed by entering a 4 digit PIN which reveals the total score along with the individual responses to each question. Once access is granted, the medical staff will also have the option to change the code or restart the app.

Apart from above features, we fixed bugs on the main flow based on the feedback, like speeding up the tide coming and leaving effect to approximately 2 seconds. Also all the questions mechanisms have been changed to Tap.

Next

Next week is the last week before Soft, so we are going to integrate all the assets and make a polished product. Fight on, Edelweiss!

About the author: Bitong Wang