Parallel: Week Fifteen

Week fifteen update:

We’ve finally made it! In this final week of development, we’ve spent the majority of our time finishing up the final features for the game and preparing our material to showcase at the ETC open house.

On the development side of things, we’ve been finalizing the implementation of puzzle hints and the challenge level functionality – this will allow players to attempt optional puzzles to get hints for more difficult puzzles that will come down the road.  We hope this will help get players over some of the more difficult bumps we’ve seen so far.

In addition to this, we had our voice actors come from the CMU School of Drama on Friday, May 4th to help us re-record the characters’ voices and perhaps lend more weight to the narrative and interaction with the world. Special thanks to Safiya Harris and Jasit Williams-Singh.

On the documentation side of the project, we’ve been working on our promotional video, giving an overview of the project and the work we’ve done this semester, as well as a post mortem for the project. We’ve also been preparing our final presentation, writing up the slides and practicing our script in the multipurpose room.

The ETC’s first ever spring open house also went well for us. We had a good variety of guests from the local area come through and try our experience, and since we didn’t have time constraints, we were able to see how long players stayed engaged in the game – as a matter of fact, we had our first naive guest finish the game to completion (it took about an hour and a half).

In the coming week, we will be wrapping up the project semester, and the future of the project is still under discussion among our team. For the time being, we all want to take a break and step back to relax for a while before potentially developing the project further. Thankfully, we have multiple avenues open for us through both of our clients, E-Line Media and Endless, who want to see the project developed further and perhaps shipped.

Parallel: Week Fourteen

Week fourteen update:

In week fourteen of the project, we’ve been busy with showing our project to faculty for soft opening. In addition to this, we’ve begun preparing our final presentations and tweaking the build to a complete state. The feedback from week thirteen was invaluable, and our build has changed a great deal in just a few days – we’ve changed the UI functionality to a drag and drop method, wrapping up implementation of the challenge levels, and ironing out bugs that occur in the gameplay that we’ve observed.

Response from soft opening was for the most part, positive – faculty enjoyed the experience, but the major sticking point for most people was some difficulty learning how to use the UI. This has been a constant challenge for us to develop on throughout the semester, and after much iteration, we still don’t feel that it’s quite as readable or intuitive as it could be. Once faculty began to get a hang of how the UI and gameplay worked however, the response was greatly positive in how it represented computational thinking – and many asked if they could play for longer or if we could send them builds to try out on their own time. (Exciting!!)

Moving into week fifteen, we’re working on polishing up some more for final presentations and the open house on May 4th. In addition to this, we’ve been compiling documentation for the ETC archives, and adding in the last couple of features we wanted to show off; challenge levels, and more professional voice acting.