[Week 7] Development Blog: PLAYTEST BEFORE HALVES

On Monday, we found out that we had halves next Monday. So, to prepare for it, we delegated different topics to everyone in the team. We did not want to make any changes in the current prototype, so, instead we decided to have playtesters come in and play our game to get their feedback. The playtest was internal, meaning that only the people from the ETC could do it.

On Tuesday, our designer started working on the design of our slides, while everyone updated the content. We reserved slots for later during the week for us to practice our presentation. The programmers were making some final changes to the prototype for our Friday playtests as well as for the demo video in our presentation.

We also polished up the mini game gameplay, adding randomness to it. It increased the difficulty, but it was still not our design priority yet. We just wanted to put it in so that the loop feels complete. On Wednesday night, we finished our prototype and we were ready to play test during the meetings next day.

Our artists were concurrently working on different art assets including buildings, terrains, rock. We also decided to put some Easter eggs by modelling buildings in Pittsburgh like the Cathedral of learning, UPMC building, CMU Walking To The Sky, etc.

To conclude our final week, we had our meetings with faculty. We playtested with them and got some feedback. After that, some first years’ came to our project room as a part of the project shadowing assignment, where they are assigned projects depending on their interests. We introduced our project to them and also playtested with them.