[Week 9] Development Blog: THE BIG PIVOT!

On Monday, we thought of a lot of ideas and arrived on a big decision – A BIG PIVOT. The biggest change we made was that we changed the mini-game. Our mini-game was now an infinite runner. But, instead of collecting coins, you collect “data” and sort of survey the area for three particular groups – Students, Patients and Commuters. Depending on how you did in the game, decides how much information you receive, for which, you can spend your budget. We also scoped down from six towns to four towns. Also, instead of Landscape view, we went to a Portrait view which made more sense with our infinite runner game.

On Tuesday, we made a rough flow of how the experience would play like. We figured that it would be better to have the measure of success in the game as the happiness of people in the towns, rather than the data collected in mini game, however, your success was dependent on how you spend your money, which is catalyzed by how you do in the mini-game. So, indirectly, we wanted to make the infinite runner game competitive to increase replayability, and make it a deciding factor on how you do further in the game to make it not so much a center of our entire game.

On Wednesday, the programmers started working on the new prototype. We prototyped a basic infinite runner game. Since we changed from Landscape to Portrait, there was some tweaking needed to be done to fix how the world reacted to our touch input. Our designer started working on the new flow, including UI, so that it can then easily be added into the game, and we will also have a concrete flow. Art department was designated with 3D buildings and characters. For that particular week, we were expecting buildings to fill up the space, and we set a deadline for Monday – Week 10.

On Thursday, we finished a paper prototype of our game to show our faculty advisors and see how they like our prototype. It was a little harder since we couldn’t really emulate the infinite runner properly, since it was under designed, and the prototype was very early stage, so the controls felt weird.

To conclude our final week, we set more deadlines. Playtest Day was the Saturday of Week 10, so we wanted to make sure we were prepared for it. Because of our pivot, we were a little worried because we felt like we were lagging a bit in terms of progress. We did not want to create a burden on ourselves, but somehow we knew that Week 10 was going to be very important and harsh on us in terms of workload. Still, everyone in the team was looking forward to it to take up the challenge. Our artists love working on the weekend, so even before the deadline we already had 3D models before the next week started. This involved some 3D buildings – My favorite ones being the Cathedral of Learning and The Heinz Stadium. We were excited to see how it looks in our prototype.