Welcome back to week 11 of our project. We are nearing the end of the semester and a lot of work is happening. Lets start with our big milestone. On Thursday we had a playtest.
The week leading up to the playtest
After our last playtest we were working on a few things.
- Rough in the whole book
- Implement changes to bear dialogue
- Create a framework for different difficulties
We were able to rough in the whole book. This meant all the narration, all of the timings were put in so the text can keep pace with the narration, all of the scenes are in and art is in, though mostly static images. We got several animations completed, including the hardest one in the whole book. This means the rest shouldn’t take too much time to implement as we move forward. Though each page still needs a decent amount of polish and timing tweaks.
We created all of the content to change the bear. New dialogue was recorded and edited. We will need some more in the future, but most of it is ready to go. It was however not implemented because we discovered a large bug which took precedence over the bear. The bug caused the tablet to mute itself. We are still working on this bug, but for the playtest all we could do was create a temporary fix where the tablet will always be playing audio. As a consequence our tablet’s battery dies pretty quickly.
The framework for multiple difficulties is ready to go, we just have to rank the sentences and that will take care of that. How the player selects the difficulty is still in the works, but it is a lower priority.
Our bear has seen lots of work too, the model is done and animations are in progress.
The Playtest
We went to a school we are working with and tested with four students. We encountered some problems. The new UI we implemented was a bit distracting. Our experience for the whole book took roughly 15 minutes. We also realized the child isn’t saying enough, especially for the length of the experience. To increase interest we will need to add more lines for the player to read. The problem here is because we chose the lines the kid currently reads based off of a one line every four pages model, but didn’t take into account that some pages have more lines than others. The playtest was largely positive, we are still analyzing the results