Month: September 2015

Dev Update #4

Hi! We're back and finished with week 4.  Which means that 1/4's are next week!  

Basically, a bunch of people from EA are going to come up, walkaround, and play our game.  After experimenting with different object types and ways to show the objects on the screen, we're in a good place to show some of work to other people (and also playtest with them). Of course, we do have some work to finish  before next Wednesday.  Sam made good progress with our video-editing tool for the game but now he has to integrate that with the main game code.  This may take a little while but afterwards, Jake and Tim will be able to do level design for the videos directly inside Unity and then load that data into the actual game.  Basically, using the tool we can set when objects appear, the location of objects, the points for objects, and more to come.  The data will be exported and loaded into the actual game.  Jack's made some progress on our UI for the controller and game UI, so people will have something better to look at next week.

Let's hope that things go well!

In the meantime, check out our current favorite video.  (it's probably gonna be in the game.)

Dev Update #3

We're doing things Star Wars style and going backwards with our dev updates right now.  Our 3rd week here at EA has gone and we've been making some steady progress with the game.  First, some key things:  We made a paper prototype.   A tool for editing videos for the game is being created in Unity.  The 1st (Basic) prototype for standard mode is finished.  Our focused Faceless designers (Jake & Tim), created two paper prototypes this week for two multiplayer game modes.  Then, they tested them with some of our unsuspecting ETC colleagues in the office.  Let's just say having Jake play a monster, faking digital power-ups by doing them in real life, and representing the function of a computer with 6 people is an interesting challenge to perform.

Very importantly, Jack finished our team photo and it captures our team perfectly...see below.

teamphoto-final-small3

Also, see videos from our playtest below.

Dev Update #2

Our 2nd week of working on the game and we have mostly been researching and discussing game ideas.  We had an idea of the vision for the game from our EA clients and we began creating ideas around that vision.  Mainly thinking of different types of interactions that would be fun for a hidden object game where players had to quickly find the objects and different game modes that would be interesting.  Multiplayer is especially important for our idea so we came up with 3 different multiplayer games modes that we made distinctly different from the other.  Our goal has been to make the modes and interactions new, interesting, and fun.  

 

We presented the ideas to our client on Wednesday with visuals and information from our research.  They had some helpful feedback and well as some great questions for us to think about. One of the obvious things is that we have to do a lot of testing for all of our ideas.  At this point, because we are making a very different type of hidden object game, everything is just speculation.  So next week, we're gonna build some prototypes and start trying to test some of them!

 

Dev Update #1 – What Exactly Are We Doing…

We began our journey this week! Our first client meeting happened, and the idea for the game ended up being COMPLETELY different than our previous thoughts. We actually came prepared to talk about ideas but they are all useless now...But that's okay. We really focused on brainstorming to think of new game design ideas/concepts for the game vision. Literally, we are planning on streaming video as the main scene instead of a static 2d image. This changes the gameplay style a lot.

So far, we've come up with 3 different games modes, each with a different feeling. 2 are cooperation based experiences and the 3rd is competitive. Competition isn't usually ever done for hidden object games so this will certainly be an experience for us.
Also, we've determined our roles. Jack - Programmer/UI Dev, Chiu - Programming/Server Manager, Sam - Lead Programmer/Tool creator, Tim - Game Designer/External Producer, Jake - Game Designer/Internal Producer
Next week we'll be presenting our game ideas so hopefully it goes well!