On Monday before the lesson I photocopied the pieces of the character and emailed them to myself, I then showed the art to my team. They liked the work I had done.
For the session we had a short lecture on game puzzle tips and tricks and then we spent the rest of the time planning for the playtest. We were encouraged to assign roles for our group when showing our game. Our mechanics designer offered to induct people into the game and give them a brief rundown of it. For the rest of the day the rest of us will take it in shifts to take notes and observe players while the rest of us go and test other peoples games.
For the rest of the day I worked on animating the character.
For our Tuesday meeting I focused on catching up on my organisation and updated the team website.
This is our to-do list I have been using it to keep track of what I need to do, colour coding my post it notes with a green dot.
I added some new tasks, design deer and peacock and moved the animation tasks to completed.
I also worked on the group website ensuring that the navigation menu is up to date and has all of the posts we have made so far.
The last thing I did was update our roadmap to better reflect our progress and I added things we had not previously thought of like sound.
Thursday Playtesting Session
On Thursday we had our first of two mandatory playtesting sessions. We structured our group so that our Mechanics Designer onboarded players and me and the Technical Designer took turns writing notes and observations on the players.
This was an extremely helpful session as I wanted to see how my animations translated and were viewed by the players. It was also nice to see where the rest of our peers have gotten to with their games.
The notes from feedback. After the session I took the notes and compiled them into a word document. Using the highlighter tool I sectioned each piece of feedback into groups of similar issues. I then created a list of what we need to improve and suggestions of how we could. On our Friday meeting we will go over this list and decide what tasks we will tackle.
This the word document. The key is as follows:
- Green – art issues
- Yellow – UI issues
- Blue – sound feedback
- Pink – story and goal issues
- Red – minigame
This is the areas to improve section, I organised it into bullet points of tasks that need doing. I then shared it with my team and the mechanics designer took the feedback further and began refining the game. Breakdown here.
Next Steps –
I need to continue to design the animals and our group decided to fix some of the issues by assigning our world designer to do the sound, and the environment artist to make a soul fragment animation.
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