Week 6 Newsletter

During this week, we figured out our project metrics at first. Our advisers helped us clear out the measurement of success. For instance, we should pay extra attention to innovation, prototyping and gameplay/interactivity, but less attention to art style or audio. The metrics not only gives faculty members in Pittsburgh a standard to evaluate our project, but also gives our own team members a strong view of priority.

Then Aiden worked out a UI/UX demo based on the game design from the previous week. Eric integrated the experimental track models within the gameplay so now the vehicle can be driven on different tests. Angela digged deeply into a data folder that is provided by Autodesk and Bandito Brothers, figured out what the data is about and filtered out the one that is useful to us. Christiana worked on the Stingray engine and explored the possibility to implement AI in our game. Feiran worked on the refined track model for speeding, which was a straight line for acceleration, and he decided to use Golden Gate Bridge as the competition location. The 3D model looks like this:

golden gate bridge demo

On Friday, we had our individual meeting with advisers for Quarters. Everyone talked about their feeling and confusion. In short, our team should be more energetic and active, therefore, we decided to have a scrum meeting at 4:30 pm everyday. In addition, we came up with a plan B for half presentation in case we won’t have enough time to deal with Dreamcatcher. If it really happens, we will replace the Dreamcatcher part with pre-set chassis models and let players unlock one model after each round. By doing that, we actually leave an interface for integrating Dreamcatcher in the future, so the basic mechanism will not be affected although it may look like a normal car speeding or training game at half.