[Week 10] Development Blog: GRIND FOR PLAYTEST DAY

On Monday, we were expecting to work a lot this week. Especially, because we wanted a decent playable prototype for Saturday’s Playtest Day. We had a deadline for the entire design flow including UI elements on Wednesday, but until then, the programmers were constantly iterating on the mini game, as well as the game flow while adding new UI elements. We were constantly playing among ourselves to see what feels wrong and what feels right to further iterate. We were also working on finding a good background music for both, the core and the mini game.

On Tuesday, we were adding more and more UI to the game, it was starting to come together. The programmers were a little worried about the infinite runner game, because the approach we used in the beginning was not very ideal for a longer experience. So, they decided to tweak it by dynamically generating objects and destroying them after their use. All the elements were modular so it was very easy to tweak the sensitivity and the distance between all the objects, and the number of objects being generated, etc. We had quite a solid algorithm to make it work

On Wednesday, our designer was almost done with the design, and our 3D artist was done making a couple of characters. We used one of them as a skateboarder in our infinite runner game. It looked pretty great!

On Thursday, since we had all our design ready, we started implementing it. We also added the sound inside the game. We wanted the sound to be calm yet playful. And we found exactly what we were looking for. The license for the sound was under Creative Commons, so all we have to do is credit the composers. We also put in all the buildings we had on the blocks as we had decided, and it looked beautiful! We were very happy with what we had, still, we did not get enough time to finish up on Thursday. But, even though Fridays are free for us, we decided to come and crunch for Saturday’s big day.

Friday was a long day, we all came in early and made sure the core loop was working well. We tweaked the minigame, added some UI and assets to it. Eventually we had a working playable prototype! What’s the time? It’s 11PM! We successfully managed to crunch the prototype. It felt wonderful, with everything laid out and ready to play! We were excited for the Playtest Day. We also got a green light from our advisors.

Playtest day was incredibly fun. We had playtesters from all ages. From Age 9 to Age 50. It was great to learn everyone’s perspective. We received very valuable feedback and we were ready to iterate based on those. Most of our playtesters really liked the game, and we were super happy from the results we received. All the critique we received was constructive, and now was the time to iterate and improve.