This was week 11 and a productive week for the team. Partly this newsletter will cover details from across last two weeks since essentially last week the entire team was at GDC.
Play Test #3
This Saturday we will be for the first time taking our project outside ETC for a play test. This will be conducted Most Wanted Art Gallery on Penn Ave as part of the GA/GI Festival organized at various locations across Pittsburgh this weekend. This would be a great opportunity to put the game in front of fresh eyes and take their feedback as to how players respond to the extended gameplay, if they are able to understand that the game asks them to work together after pushing them to work in teams first. In order to best optimize player’s time and gather feedback, we have also created a feedback form for them to fill out. This event has been covered by PopCityMedia site and give us a good numbers of players to play our game with. Since our client mobile application has not yet been published to the marketplace we are going prepared with as many mobile devices as possible in order to get a larger team to play the game.
New and Improved Gameplay
For this week (week #2 of our sprint) our initial focus was to be feature complete from the main gameplay perspective. Although we are not quite there yet but what we have tried to focus our energy on getting all the key elements in the game to maximize our time and effort. The game mechanics are introduced to the players as part of different story based themed elements so as to not take players out of the experience and layer the mechanic one after the other, not all at the same time together. The events that we have implemented and will be the focus for the play test are –
- Army Increasing mechanic – After country selection, the first game mechanic introduced to the players is how to increase their army strength. By singing into their phone the players get a hang of how to increase their army numbers.
- Country Expansion mechanic – This is introduced to the concept of “Barbarian Tribes” who show up on the map. The players have higher strength than these tribes but need to expand their territory in order to extinguish them from the map. In this manner they get a hang of the game’s territory expansion mechanic.
- Power of Silence mechanic – We understand from our previous play tests that players get tired soon so this would be a critical element in the game giving them some breathing space. This is introduced in the game by adding a UFO element to the game. The idea behind this is that if a team is making noise (if their is input detected from their end), the UFO ship starts attacking the territory. To avoid UFO attack territories need to them need to go quite.
- Virus Attack – Since this is possibly the most important and the most risky element in the game we want to test this as early as possible. For this we have introduced the virus element in the game with test art assets. Once the virus is introduced each player needs to coordinate together to in order to defeat the virus and the concept of boundaries and territories no longer holds any significance since eventually the virus would spread to all regions.
Mobile Client Testing
We have struggled long and hard to achieve our goal of supporting most Android and iOS devices. For this we started looking into emulator support for these on various platforms that could be coupled with Unity for testing. Unfortunately Android emulators available in the market do not support Mic functions in the emulator and the app crashes on any emulator that we have tried. Also, we have started exploring into iOS emulators available in the market to test our app for a wide range of iOS versions and devices including phones and tablets. This has been a really cumbersome process so we have started looking into hiring professional QA support for testing the application (this was first suggested by Jesse as part of Halves presentation feedback). For this we will be reaching out to Schell Games, our clients and doing our independent search if we can acquire services for some company that can help us get the app tested and published to the marketplace.
Finding Play Tests and Players
This has always been our biggest challenge so we are always on the lookout for interesting opportunities to put our game in front of a naive audience each time. The distribution of the application for these beta tests itself has been the biggest hurdle. Both, TestFlight and HockeyApp did not work since they cannot by-pass the Apple’s UDID registration requirements. For this I have reached out to main campus, Laura Walsh with Steve Audia help to find out the most elegant way of distributing the application to our players making the whole process as smooth as possible.
The team is working hard to prepare for the play test tomorrow. This will be an important step for us to determine how well the game plays out and provide us the feedback to balance the game better. That’s it from this week, have a nice weekend.
Mayank Grover