Week 5 – Progress

We’re wrapping up our 1st prototype Gibbering Revelation and working on 2nd and 3rd mini-game design.

Gibberish Revelation Game Play
Gibberish Revelation Flowchart

We share our progress with our instructors and client. From the customer meeting and process grade meeting, we learned that

  • The mini-game should be more fun and engaging. It could be adding more layers, freedom, or complexities to the core game mechanics. 
  • We should start to have playtestes as playtesting provides feedback and support for us. It could provide new inspiration for us. It could be evidence that our games are interesting to the players. However, we shouldn’t count on playtesting to give us new input. 
  • 2 or 3 really fun mini-games are better than 5 not so great mini-games but 5 mini-games is a goal that pushes us to come up with more ideas. Until we have 1 game that we’re confident enough to iterate further, we should keep having more design and prototypes. 

Based on these information, we reviewed our last sprint and set our short term goals –

Review previous sprint

  1. Improve communication between programmers and designers 
  2. Improve communication within the design team 
    1. Daily meeting? 
    2. Brainstorm sessions?
  3. Improve communication within the programming team 
  4. Designers should actively look for new inspirations 

Short Term Goals

  1. Playtests for Gibbering Revelation 
  2. Continue working on the 2nd and 3rd mini-games design docs
  3. Use Choreographer software to achieve basic dance game mechanics 
  4. Playtests for the dance game mechanics to answer the questions:
    1. For players: Is it fun to control Spot’s moves to hit the bits along the music?
    2. For tech: Is it possible to achieve this rhythm game mechanics?
  5. Achieve casic QR code game mechanics
    1. For tech: is it possible to achieve the basic mechanics?

Tasks

  1. Playtests for Gibbering Revelation 
  2. Finish 2nd and 3rd mini-games design docs
    1. Design doc should include
      1. Description
      2. Test plan and expected results
      3. Visuals – UI sketch, layout sketch, workflow chart, references, etc.
  3. Achieve basic dance game mechanics.
  4. Playtests for basic dance game mechanics. 
  5. Achieve basic QR code game mechanics

Goal for the client meeting at Week 6

  • Tech demo for basic mechanics 
  • Playtesting results 
  • Updated design

Finally, sharing our project poster and logo here 😀