Week 9: Halves and Broadcast

This week the Tuesday Tales team presented our halves progress and continued to work on our prototype. At halves, the team showed the faculty the current prototype with the location tracking and building destruction. We also outlined our plan to finish the broadcast and reward sections of the loop done by soft opening in week 14. The faculty and other students who saw our presentation gave us very valuable feedback that we will use going forward with our project.

 

The team also got some time to work on our broadcast and reward part of the main loop. For these areas, we are going to allow players to take images with their Kaiju to help their friends hatch eggs or to impact the reward they get from destroying buildings. These images will be shared in app and can be posted to Facebook to promote our app amongst player’s social groups. The reward loop will consist of players being rewarded with Kaiju or resources for destroying buildings and hatching eggs.

Nicky has been working hard at adding these pieces of the loop and has gotten it so that we can capture photos from the iOS device and superimpose the Kaiju over them. Jin has been working working to make more art assets to better matching real and virtual buildings as well as to give players more options for Kaiju. Xiao has been working to formalize our UI and flow structure so that our programmers can focus their last development week on building in the app flow. Emre has been working to finalize our proximity and perform connection so we can better manage our buildings and switch between the states. Jonathan has been working to formalize our game design document to ensure all our discussions are captured and to ensure we have everything we decided we needed by the end of next week.

Week 8: Halves Prep and Proximity -> Perform

This week, the Tuesday tales team prepared to present our progress to the faculty for halves. Matt, Xiao, and Jonathan worked on the content and visuals for the presentation. Xiao and Jin worked together to make a concept video to help share our current progress to the faculty. The whole team then came together to practice our presentation so that we would be ready for after spring break.

 

While the team preparing for halves, work was also put into combining the location proximity work with the building destruction prototype made the week before. This means that the current prototype now allows for players to go to locations and destroy buildings. This allows us to test half of our gameplay loop, proximity and perform. This means that the next couple weeks will be devoted to finishing the resource loop and adding in a broadcast component. As well as making more art assets to better tie real world buildings and the buildings in the game.

Week 7: GDC and Building Destruction

This week the some of the Tuesday Tales team left for a conference and few members stayed to further develop the project. Emre, Jonathan, Xiao, and Matt attended the game developers conference in San Francisco. While they were there, they got the chance to learn a lot more about game development and location based games. It was also a chance to make connections that will help them both for this project and for their careers.

This left Nicky and Jin in Pittsburgh to further develop the project. They focused on prototyping the city destruction components for our experience. Players can tap on portions of the buildings in order to destroy them and damage their contents and occupants. The player can also slide between buildings to destroy a set that make up that location. This means that our work in the coming weeks will be hooking our two prototypes together and rounding out the experience.