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.