This week had almost everything to do with communication: how we communicate with each other, with faculty advisors and other faculty members, with naive guests and playtesters, and with each other as teammates.
Halves
From halves, we had a lot of valuable feedback, most of which revolved around clarity of communication. While most expressed that the project does look interesting, few seemed to truly understand the purpose of working on this project. In the future, we’d really like to work harder to emphasize that, so we will be moving forward with aggressive deadlines, which brings us to…
Feature Dates
Weekly Updates
We will be utilizing a weekly system of Featured Dates from now until the end of the semester. Once per week, every Wednesday, we will have a new set of complete updates for the build of the game to be entirely implemented. This will be clearly documented on the new Trello board, which we have developed to help us recover valuable time and see where we need to trim some edges to deliver a final game. We hope these dates will help our team stay on track, show our work, and develop a clearer, more articulate procession of thought for the faculty by Soft Opening and Finals.
What is a Successful Project?
Additionally, the entire team will be focusing on the purpose of our project. We would like to all agree on a single, one-line sentence of what a successful project will be and shoot for that. This will help us all have a clearer vision of what a successful project must be, but it will also keep us personally and communally accountable for the work that we are all doing.
Playtest Day
We also participated in April 1’s Playtest Day. Thanks, Michael & Jiaxin, and also to the rest of the faculty at the ETC who were kind enough to set up the day/forum for all of us. We synthesized a lot of feedback, and made some key determinations. The most significant is the test of the type of tile we ought to design. Playtesters who fell within our target demographic primarily chose the crackling “shattering crystal” design Jiaxin has develop, instead of our original “candlelight” idea. The candle concept, shown above our iterated design, resonated with the most naive of our playtesters/guests, but less so with our target demographic of board game lovers. Therefore, we will be moving forward with the shattering crystal design to see if it continues to resonate with our playtest audience.
Playtesters were able to complete our experience from start to finish, but they had some trouble with understanding the inventory, the starting point, and other visual aspects. We are hoping to learn from this valuable feedback to meaningfully pivot into something that’s easier to communicate.
What Now?
So, moving forward with this new weekly feature date in mind, our deadlines have become aggressive, as our first concrete update will be this Wednesday, April 5.
Technology
We will have a complete game build from Unity by this Wednesday. We will be working out the control synchronization bugs that have arisen, and will have all of the fully animated, rigged, and textured assets we agreed upon by this Wednesday for the faculty to play.
Design
We will implement the UI/UX decisions of the iterated sending system, which has been simplified for our programmer, Michael, and also in the interest of clear communication. This trading system redesign will be entirely new, but we anticipate that this will be easier to implement into the build.
Art Development
The following assets/models, fully rigged and animated, will be incorporated into our build:
- Key
- Inventory
- 4 items (send, heal, reveal, jump)
- Win/lose assets (particle effects to indicate win or lose)
- Start & end tile (currently working on start/end iterations)
- Event assets, paper model
- Event text
- Helper
- UI/UX of controller for sending
- Round system UI/UX
Technical Design Document
The technical design document will begin development this week, after the completion of the template for the ease of the rest of the team. We hope this will supplement the completion of the VR game.
What’s Next?
We will be developing the following 2 week weekly updates (Feature Dates) for the rest of the semester. Then we will be rapidly prototyping until the end of the semester.