This was quite an informative week for the development of our project. On Monday, there was a guest lecture from an indie studio CANTEEN. They provided us with information about their work on CorpoNation and their 12 pieces of advice on creating a video game. The most interesting points to me were striving to create less with greater quality and doing a playtest before the game is completely polished. They talked about the importance of good gameplay pillars, but not being afraid to change direction when the current strategy does not bring results.
On Thursday, we got an opportunity to present the minimum playable prototype. The students provided us with a shark tank critique of our first functioning prototype. We presented a simple prototype test scene of the interaction between our game protagonist and our NPC Tyler using the initial dialogue system. As CANTEEN suggested us, there were no time to postpone implementing some elements of the game, and we decided to show the basic drawing of the user interface the social pressure on our hero during the dialogue. We received some valuable remarks, but it was pretty hard to accept them. In particular, a few players admitted that they found it complicated to construct sentences from separate pieces. For example, they did not know how to connect the pieces and make up an adequate answer. The most important task that we have in our next sprint stage is to assess whether we need to replace the mechanism or not.