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.