We started off week 7 with our client meeting on Monday, this meeting was pretty important for us, as it would be the first time that the client saw our new game design and prototype. The clients were impressed with the look and feel of the prototype, and seemed excited by the options that our new method offered. They offered up the idea of perhaps changing the setting between tracks to add variety to the game, which we considered, but believed would add a significant amount of development time. This may eventually be a stretch goal that we are capable of meeting but in the short term we plan to continue finalizing our functionality. Our clients wanted to be sure that there would be ample opportunities to “wave the flag” as they put it, and particularly wanted to confirm that we would be able to effectively work their athletes into the game. The clients asked us why we shifted from the 8 lane concept that we had down to a four lane concept, we explained that this was because we did not intend to have same screen competition in this new design. The clients were interested to know if we had come up with a name for the game yet, and asked us if we could name the game Run With Us so that it would blend with the rest of the marketing for their program. We told the clients that we intended to make the main character an alien cat, which they did not oppose provided that the athletes would not be cats as well.
We began to focus on developing the flow of the game, and created rough UI elements to simulate the flow of the menus. We also began the development of the level builder system, and completed the rough draft of this system later in the week. We developed a character model for the cat character, but realized that animating the character would take up a significant amount of development time. We did some research, and found that with our Adobe CC license provided by the school, that we could make use of Mixamo’s auto rigging and animation software at no cost. We wanted to be sure that the school would be ok with us using these animations however, and added this to our list of questions to ask our faculty at our Wednesday meeting. Our faculty said that since we only have one artist on our team, they did not see a problem with us importing the Mixamo animations if animating was going to cut in to our ability to properly develop. The remainder of the week was spent integrating our new art assets and level builder into the working prototype, and setting up the menu system to follow the game flow that we designed.