During the Easter break, I have dedicated my time to fixing up the UI of our main website and making it look more presentable. As we came back from holidays, I finally finished the remaining parts of the script. I have also checked the grammar the whole script and changed a few things that were paid attention to during the last playtest. At this point, we were all preparing for the final event at the cafeteria on week 10.
Unfortunately, over the Easter, I was informed that one of our teammates has used AI without letting anyone else know. It was done after we had a discussion about no AI usage in this project, and it really discouraged me in the last weeks of working with this team. Nothing could be changed at this stage of the progress, so we had to stick to the content that was already provided. Because of this, we had to also cut off the ending of the story where the player returns to the real world. We could not trust this teammate to complete the work while everyone else had their own jobs to do.
We had a conversation with the teachers on Thursday and I have explained the whole situation. We were advised to focus on the other assignment that we had coming up, because the damage was already done and there wasn’t enough time to fix anything. Despite the demoralisation and state of stress that I found myself in by the end of the week, I managed to focus on the deadlines I had.
Week 10 was when the event was held, and the time before Tuesday was spent on fixing up the remaining technical issues in the game, as well as uploading it to itch.io for easier access. Since we didn’t have much time to have a poster drawn, I’ve spoken to Scarlett and asked if we could use the poster she drew last semester, since it looked really good and still fit the look of the game. On Tuesday, I came in to put the poster in the hallway.
Thursday morning was dedicated to tech preparation for the event. We set up the PCs in the cafeteria and, since the game was uploaded to itch.io, it was easy to load it up. However, because the game wasn’t opening on the full screen, someone decided to try and fix it, which resulted into the game file collapsing. All the dialogue got squished into a narrow row of letter and the UI was almost in the middle of the screen. I couldn’t figure out whose idea was it, but fortunately it was fixed and we could continue on with the playtest.
Some photos from the event! I have also played some of our groupmates’ games and all of them turned out to be great. The diversity of genres and styles was incredible and I loved that we had so many people attending the exhibition.
I offered Jess to make a Word document where people would be able to write down their thoughts as they played the game. Due to the fact that the we had to connect her laptop in order to fix the bugged game file, people had to use its keyboard for keys.
Final feedback from the event:
Personal takeaways from feedback:
- Choosing to keep Scarlett’s idea of game introduction was a good decision.
- People didn’t quite get the irony of a little girl having a random screwdriver in her bag, as well as overall mechanic of taking the hoop of the statue with it…would be great if we also explained its existence by the fact that Mabel needs to fix the camera
- Maybe we could have altered the character’s appearances and added some original designs.
- Adding more interactions with the characters would also make the game more appealing, I noticed people trying to interact with unusable objects as well.
Moving forward, I would definitely pay more attention to smaller details and take note of what people want to see in the game. People love finding small features and hidden mechanics that aren’t necessarily important to the main storyline.
Looking at the project as a whole, I really wish many things went differently, but at the same time the experience I have gained over the past semester is very valuable. Time after time I get reminded that communication is important, but some things cannot be fixed and I just need to come to terms with them for the sake of the project. The role of Project Manager is draining, and I wouldn’t want to repeat the same mistakes I did while working on this game.
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