Newsletter 4

The fourth week of the development for Prisoner’s Cinema is the week before Entertainment Technology Center milestone – Quarters walkarounds. That means that faculty will be able to get the first glance at the project and get the feeling of it. Our goal for it is to put the emotions and ideas that we want to convey through the game in the most presentable form.

We have finally finished our basic promotional materials: website is launched and our team photo is ready. We welcome everybody to browse, and promise that soon there will be more content and social media resources connected to our project.

Since the playable version of the game that we are working on will be a rough prototype, we don’t expect it to be a very good emotional representation of the final project. For this reason Nathan has been working all week on documenting our ideas in game flow documents and writing user stories, so that we have a tangible way to describe our plan.

At the same time, the playable prototype remains our strong objective. Casey keeps iterating on the building where our character lives, and since this will be the place where the player will spend the most time, he is putting a lot of attention to the details. He is currently modeling and texturing specific objects for the quest, which we will not announce in this newsletter to keep some narrative secrets(!) that we will elaborate on later.

Alex was implementing a lot of things for the prototype. He worked on visual effects, to convey the feeling of grogginess of the character, specifically vignette effect and eye blinking. He also continued improving the player movement from different aspects, so that the player can relate to the character by being able to see his body and its motions and implemented basic conversation engine, so we can demonstrate some dialogue in our demo.

Arseniy has continued to conduct Scrum meetings and analyzing the process, so that in future sprints the team can accommodate the most significant parts of it and avoid time consuming elements that don’t work so well for the team. He also has started to work on the sound library and preparing the sound effects for the prototype to create the general atmosphere that we will start iterating on after Quarters.

And what is probably even more important, the posters finally arrived for the decoration. Now we are proud owners of these beautiful images that will inspire us eternally.

By Wednesday of the next week (when our Quarters time is scheduled), we will have a working prototype of our game. We are excited.