It’s been a very busy week.
We started off meeting with our advisor, Mike Christel, who helped us plan out the week. As a team, we decided to spend two weeks rapid prototyping four games as two smaller teams. We also met with our sponsor, Dr. Thomas B. Talbot, on Wednesday just to update him on our progress.
Our first two games starred a bird trying to break through walls and a girl trying to get off a giant ball of bubble wrap–Wings of Fury, and Bubble Wrap Run. We spent long and hard hours trying to get the games functioning by this Friday, especially since we learned late in the week that there was a high school group touring the facility that we could use as guinea pigs…I mean testers. We did get up a first iteration for both games, but the mechanics and graphics remained rough. Because of this fact, we chose to simply show the students our work rather than have them try to play them and be frustrated with the controls.
It worked out well. The students were very interested and inquisitive towards our project, and we did let them play Robot Unicorn Attack–an established online game to which we rigged a Kinect in order to test body movement as a control for scrolling games. They enjoyed it very much.
We also found time to theme our room! We managed to put our hands on some athletic equipment that isn’t currently being used and decorated the room with it, including hockey nets, volleyballs, and skies!
As of tonight, our team is busy trying to better the mechanics of our game as well as tweak animations and add better textures in an effort to have a playable demo for Monday. We imagine we will be slowing down our next round of rapid prototypes for this one went a little too fast to build a demo that playtesters would not find frustrating, but the next couple of weeks should bring some great ideas and exciting new mechanics.
