Almost at the halfway point in the semester. The week started off with a small unofficial playtest session. We invited a few employees from EA to come over to our project space and try out our latest build. It was interesting to see some of them who had come for quarters coming back, excited to see what new things we managed to put into the game. We tested the three prototypes we had built – The portals, hand and animal prototypes. The playtest provided some very useful information. It was clear from playtesting that the hand prototype wasn’t ready to be put into the game. The Tango has a lot of trouble with hand detection due to it’s limited detection range and poor sensor framerate. The other two prototypes, however, were received positively.
This is around the time of the semester where teams must start thinking about the final deliverable and how they are going to get there. We had a few meetings over the week to think about what we wanted our halves prototype and final deliverable to look like, and thinking about what needs to be done to get us there. The first thing we did was to assign tasks to each member for our next milestone – halves. KH is going to be working on the rendering and optimizations, Nigel is going to be putting all the pieces of the game together, and I am going to be working on the more experimental portions of the project (like working on a better implementation of hand detection). Wei is our artist and game designer, and Chuck is our primary producer, taking care of all the administrative tasks and keeping the entire system running smoothly. We also discussed a rough timeline for the rest of the semester, which will ensure that we are continuously testing our product every two weeks until the final presentations.
We started thinking about our halves presentations too. We were able to check out the space that we will be presenting in – A hall called circle triangle. We have also tentatively decided to use the arcade space next to it for our product demoes. All this will become clearer during the course of next week, when we will also start to practice our presentations ,create demo videos and finalize our product.
On Friday, we were able to hang out with the other advisors from each of our teams – Tom for Gotan, and Heather for Faceless. They both had some pretty good feedback for our project, and it was nice to be able to interact with them face-to-face. This was obviously a great time to finish up our individual advisor meetings as well.