Project Newsletter 10 (11/03 – 11/07)

Week Overview
 
We went into this week off a playtest from the weekend, which we found to be helpful in many ways. It was with 2 children for 20mins each, giving us a different overview from the last, where we had over 60 playtesters doing surveys. This way we could use observation a lot more, and ask more direct questions. Using this, we are making some adjustments, as well as adding more animals.
 
Production
This week James coordinated with the client to set the date our next playtest as Friday, Nov. 14th.  He helped focus the team’s efforts to addressing the needed changes and fixes from Saturday’s playtests.  He also lent a hand with creating UI elements from the style Chong and Bing laid out for development of the logbook.
 
Design
Christian worked this week to program animations for the GUI in the logbook.  The team wanted to give it a juicer and more responsive feel, as it serves as a center point for a lot of the functionality.  Towards the end of the week, he added the first prototype of the food web page to the logbook, and added code so that a tapped food web node goes to that animal’s info.  He also began working on specifications for adjustments to be made to the in-game map.
 
Art
Eric  completed the model the arctic fox at the beginning of the week, finishing our intended list of models, excluding the arctic hare.  He was also able to modify the arctic wolf to make a wolf puppy model, before moving on to work on the terrain.  He spent the rest of the week working with the World Machine engine to come up with a new layout for the terrain which he then started tweaking and polishing.

Shashank spent a lot of time rigging different models this week. It involved wolf pups, the seal, the arctic fox and then ending with starting on the eider ducks. This would give him a great starting point for next week, allowing him to spend a lot of time animating these for the playtest build next Friday.
 
Programming
This week Ken worked on a number of adjustments based on the results of the playtest.  He added touch controls for moving the binoculars camera, pinching to zoom in and out, and tapping the UI magnifying glass to investigate clues.  He also adjusted the game so that tracking an animal would unlock its data, and players are now able to track all the animals in the game. Some information we thought would be beneficial to us was seeing where the users walked in the world. Levi implemented additions to the playtesting API to collect info on player’s movements in the game world.
 
Next Week
Next week the team will put forth it’s best effort to make the rest of the adjustments from the last playtest, as well as including new animals, new animal behaviours, and a new terrain to get the most out of the upcoming playtest.