Combining the assets
Week 13’s main goal was to bring all of the assets we had created this semester together. With a finalized UI and nearly all of our features complete and ready for deployment we worked to create a fully functional prototype for an early-Week 14 playtest.
This week, the UI underwent several rounds of revision to ensure readability and ease of understanding. We also worked to ensure that users would have a relatively seamless experience from the web-based registration platform to logging in and playing in the game itself. To do this we not only graphically linked the two together, but also used both as means to tell more about the product and the game, letting the player know what the game was about and generally what they would be doing in it. We look forward to seeing the reactions of our playtesters to the registration process.
On the database side, we continued to finalize the features that access it, making sure that the loading and saving of layouts works seamlessly and efficiently. We also continued trying to link up our client’s computers into the database infrastructure by supplying them a Virtual Machine. While it did deploy successfully we continue to have network glitches, which we will hopefully resolve within the next week.
Finalized textures have been loaded into the game as well. We are quite pleased with the futuristic, yet approachable atmosphere they have created. Additionally, parts diagram videos were created, showing players where parts go on the concept car. This is one component of our in game tutorial system, which we will continue to expand upon with additional instructional videos. All audio for the overhead play mode has also been made available to the programming team for inclusion in this build. Final UI and walkaround audio will be slipped in before softs.
Finally, we took an afternoon to shoot some content for our three minute and thirty second videos. This went well and we’ll be spending this week editing and polishing them.
Overall, this has been an extremely busy week for the whole team as we push to release as complete a product as we can.