Month: April 2018

Week thirteen update:

In week thirteen we’ve focused on getting our build ready for soft opening. Early in the week we drove out to Elizabeth Forward High School for a playtesting session with the students in the game creation class and beginner programming class. These students were a mix of genders and ages, with varying experience in playing games. We tested our most recent build with the new environment, updated UI, and narrative/tutorial VO. Our survey can be found here.

Following this playtesting session, we’ve worked on polishing the build, showing to faculty for feedback on soft opening presentations. Most of this focus has been on improving ease of usability so students will be able to focus on learning the puzzles and concepts behind them rather than how to use/navigate the game.

This weekend and upcoming week, we plan to re-record the voiceover, adding in narrative. In addition to this, we are finishing up the final version of the UI, and tweaking some of the puzzles that presented problems during playtests.

Week twelve update:

In week twelve, we’ve refined our approach to our final product. We’ve decided to back off from the previous decision of “open world,” after a few meetings where we realized that in all this discussion what we’re really aiming for is to give the player a sense of progression, with some meaningful choice in the puzzles they solve.

We’ve maintained the idea of giving players modules as they progress, but have vastly simplified the environment and as an extension, taken a lot of stress off of our art and design decisions to be made.

In this model, we’ve returned to a somewhat linear scheme, with challenge puzzles, which are harder than the main progression. These challenge puzzles can be skipped – but they will be given a completion score to judge their progress in learning how to use the modules/solve puzzles. In addition to this, it gives the player the opportunity to replay the game and experience challenge puzzles they might have passed over the first time through.

This week, we’ve also been preparing our final build, getting it to a playable point where we can test it at Elizabeth ISD on April 17th for our final testing session.

Week eleven update:

This week Team Parallel has been working on ironing out some of the remaining kinks in our open world design – particularly the player’s progression through the space and providing them with a sense of freedom without putting too much strain on our team and over-scoping.

With regards to progression, we’ve taken a step back from the overall map, and taken a good look at the order we want the players to learn code modules.

We will be able to use this chart to develop the environment and arrangement of puzzles – helping inform our design. In addition to this, we’ve been working on reducing the scope of our world; originally we’d planned to include 24 puzzles on top of the larger final puzzle, but we have been working on scoping down to around 16 puzzles, merging some of the already done work into the final puzzle and shrinking the environment work.

Another update we have this week is part of the sound assets for the tutorial, and we have been making headway on some of the companion dialogue for the game. We chose to use a text to speech program for the AI, as we feel that it reflects it’s character and it’s easy for us to add/remove voice lines in the game.

Audio can be found in a zipped file here.

Moving forward, we’re gearing up to test our whiteboxed puzzles and updated UI this Saturday, April 7th. We have a great opportunity here to work with students in the 13-18 age range, and there will be a lot of room to get feedback throughout the day.