This week was our first week out of preproduction, and we definitely saw that we had a lot that needs doing. We ran another playtest for visitors and worked on the design more, focusing on the edicts (rewards for fulfilling wants that will change the game) and disasters (events to increase difficulty, keep the drama up, and teach about problems facing living sustainable lives) that we wanted to have in the game. We did a bunch of research on UI, looking at talks by over a dozen successfully shipped titles and how and why they made their UI the way they did. We eventually came up with this concept:
Where the top would be the city, which each player can view. They can then swipe down to reveal the their own base, where most of the gameplay will take place. Here they will get waste, which slots into one of the circles, and can process waste at their recycling building at the bottom of the screen. The timer counts down to when the new waste will appear.
We also continued our networking research. We ran into a few issues with communication, since CMU’s wifi was denying our connection and disallowing communication to external. We talked with another student, Sharan Shodhan, about networking advice as well.