Week 11 started off with our meeting with our client, and we presented to them our strategy for the remaining weeks of the semester. We explained to them the improvements that we were making in the tutorial and dialog system of the game, and established a meeting with Trixie to discuss viable athletes to include in the game. We proceeded to discuss the live event system that we are planning to implement in a few weeks to the clients. The system calls for the creation of three maps of increasing difficulty, each with a required time to proceed to the next level. We believe that this will encourage friendly competition between the kids at the live events, while still allowing kids that do not play the game well to revisit the levels that they have not finished yet. Overall our clients seemed very happy with our progress since halves last week, and we plan to use this week to keep our momentum going.
After the client meeting we began refining our tutorial system and our level design to get ready for the playtest on Saturday. This playtest is one of the last few playtests that we will have a chance to run, so we want to be sure to present the best version of our game possible so that we can get good feedback to move forward from. In addition to this, we noticed in some peer review testing that some of our UI elements were not reading properly, so we took the time to redesign these elements for clarity.
The playtest itself went quite well, the kids seemed engaged with the game and were actively interacting with their peers while playing. We did run in to some readability issues when it came to the tutorial, and we noticed that we had problems with the way our audio was being instantiated. This lead to multiple audio clips trying to play at once, which would confuse or even startle the kids playing the game. We plan to spend time next week revising our tutorial, polishing art assets, and beginning work on the live event system.