Week 7: X Marks the Spot

While this game is extraordinarily precious, the real treasure was the friendships we made along the way.

I've gotta be honest, I'm running out of thematically appropriate segues for the blog posts.

...



So I've been working on the music, and it has been brutal as a result of me having a well developed knowledge of music theory, but incredibly insignificant understanding of the use and application of synthesizers, which makes the intended application of my musical ideas frustrating at best. I feel as though I have made a great deal of progress in the last, but the track is still somewhat lacking for now. I am retaining hope that my musician friends will come through and allow me to do live recordings, but I am confident that I can produce a respectable tune regardless.

Week 07: A Baby is Born Again

Wow! So our game is going well. I think? I hope. It feels like it is.

We've mostly just been fixing up stuff. The biggest thing to add is the voice clips now. We may have a VA, but if that VA thing falls through, one of us will do the lines. Hoo-boy. I'd be happy to do the lines if we need it, but that means y'all gonna have to be ready for my voice and how I try to voice act. It's not really a pretty thing to be honest.

ANYWAYS, I'm not sure what to write exactly. We're doing well. There isn't much drama at the moment. We've been talking about how on Etsy you can buy Overwatch themed slime and that that's very weird. But also kind of amazing.

I think our game is really going well. I'm not OVERCONFIDENT here (cause we all know overconfidence is a slow and insidious killer) but I'm confident we can finish what we need to have a decent game by the end of this class. We'll definitely need to continue polishing after that if we want this game to be what it was born to be, but that's for the future.

Here's some of the stuff I'm working on. I'm going to add some squash and stretch to the actual balls. Daria suggested it and I fully agree, it'd add a lot more character I think.

Week 07: I'm busy!

Last week: I found a ton of fonts and tried them out to make a fun title. Made the title screen. Parsed out the buttons.

This week: Make the settings screen, change the font and designs of the prompts.

Week 07: Knickity Knack

Inspiration! Motivation! All the things! ...are back.

After seeing the playtesters play through our game and enjoy it, I felt a bit better about the game. After a couple more meetings and a couple more art attempts on my part, I;m back in it. I honestly don't have much to write this week. We've changed the background art and buttons -which aren't implemented just yet- but they look great. I SWEAR.

Alpha build

Right so that thing I'm supposed to do or else I'm somehow a lazy student? Whatever, here's the build:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B48MbGMg2nn2RnU4cXloOC1IVTA

Woo.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1kj14Ufm6Dxen6yADML_9O_aBPeLPPLgAI8FCV6P3voQ/edit?usp=sharing

Now I'm going back to actually developing it before I go to my FULL-TIME JOB.

Week 6: Land Ho!

The design and development process for "Fingers Crossed" has been consistently rocky, with frequent indecision and mixed feedback plaguing our progress at every turn. Despite having supreme confidence in the efficacy of our ambition, I too faltered as morale wavered, and uncertainty loomed. The frequency of uneasy sentiments gradually climbed, as each of us individually questioned if we had been charting the proper course to success, leaving us little option but to charge forth, unafraid of our seemingly incorporeal destination.

Because of this, it is with great pleasure that I feel the last week of progress can be described as no less than an absolute triumph. Both in terms of feedback from various testing parties and of team unity, our path has been made clear, and we are able to proceed with full knowledge and comfort that we are where we would like to be.

At this point, most of our incoming responses have pertained to the clarity of information, and several of our players have had various nitpicks about the nature of our interface, which is exactly the kind of problem that we want to be having at this stage. If such a large portion of our testers (for what we are declaring our "alpha build," to be clear) are garnering such enjoyment out of our game even with myriad rough aspects, it suggests to me that the quality ceiling of our game is far higher than I had ever imagined.

I know I say this fairly often, and it comes across as severely overbearing, but I am tremendously proud of the excellent quality of work that my teammates have consistently put forth. I have said this many times, but I am truly thankful (and exceptionally lucky) to be honored to work with such kind and talented people. They make me extremely hopeful and optimistic about the potential of our game.

Week 06: I was anxious for NOTHING

I had so much anxiety about class today and I'm not entirely sure why. I was worried our game wouldn't be good enough to even play or something like that. I think my anxiety might've been more about my own emotions than the actual situation (obviously) but yeah. After class today I dunno, I'm more optimistic. DON'T GET ME WRONG, we still have a LOT to accomplish and I'm worried about that, but I think I'm a little less worried about the things that aren't worries. Which is good, if that even made sense.

We've got an alpha! I mean it's ROUGH but we've got something. We need to add clarity, that's the most important part. Polish is important too, but making the gameplay clear to the player is more important than even that. Currently we have a lot of "messing with the players" in our gameplay, but we need that to be clear too. It shouldn't be "I'm messing with you and you don't know" it should be, "you know I'm messing with you but you're still playing". I think we can definitely make that happen. Or I'm gonna hope we can since optimism is helpful sometimes.

What I can say for sure is that it's the best feeling in the WHOLE WORLD to see someone play your game and smile. Yeah ok, the smile might not mean the game is good at all, but boy does it feel nice. Even if the smile is short lived, just knowing that someone got a kick out of a project I was a part of makes me feel like I've done something. I hope to finish game mod with a game that makes people smile and makes them CONTINUE to smile throughout gameplay. A game that makes them feel awkward but feel a little bond afterwards like "hey I touched that guy's finger". It makes everything else feel a bit less awkward which I think is really nice.

I GUESS I'M JUST in a good mood right now. We've still got a ton of work to do but my passion has been returned to me. I can see this game being a really fun game. A game to be proud of. I'm excited to work towards that goal.

week 06: we have things!

Technically, it's week 6 of development, but week 7 of the quarter. I think? Maybe?

I think we're finally back on track.
We've updated a few things since last week. If I remember correctly we have since added a main menu page, an end screen, the background changes according to who is in the lead, a timer of sorts, and a settings page. Then a few nights later, we have visual prompts, a score bar, and individual sounds.

There's still more to go. Updated menu pages. Audio cues for prompts. More prompts. And good ol' Mr. Face! (It's the name I've give our narrator.)

We've playtested it a bit the other day. It was entertaining to watch others play. We received some good feedback. Things we did well. Things we can improve on.

People interacted, they got engaged. One mentioned that they don't usually get competitive but this brought it out. Players laughed at the ridiculousness of the game and even with each other. Some wanted to keep playing. It was evident when someone was looking at the game on their own and three other people joined in. One of my favorite moments was when some players realized the background color corresponded with whomever was winning, which sparked more competition.

Here's a quick video of what it looked like:
https://youtu.be/qoauW0VVzDw

Week (5?)- Hoist Somethin'

The other posts are probably going to talk about how many times we have dramatically changed direction in the last 2 weeks, so I'll try to focus on something different: sounds!

Right now, all of the sounds in our game are placeholders that were barely thrown together after several dozen things had gone wrong with the recording process. I even taught myself my intended musical theme on the piano only to realize that I lacked the proper cable to record the audio (and in fact, I was given reason to believe that it didn't exist). Eventually I contacted a musician friend of mine, and he tossed together a quick 30 second loop to tide us over, and used my PC headset microphone to capture assorted mouth sounds. They are gross and ineffective, but up until now, they have served their purposes.

The time has come, however, to toss in some actual audio, and I've been tinkering around to make that music come to fruition- I even broke out my violin for the first time in three years and tried to dig my brother's old bass out of my basement (only to find that the case was empty). After a few hours, I came up with something that I was reasonably happy with, but each mechanical and thematic change our game has undergone recently has made the theme less and less appropriate, which means I will be spending the weekend starting from scratch on that again. The current tone is both goofy and sinister, but also tense, which is kind of a difficult assortment to capture all at once. I think I'm fine at composing, but I honestly have no clue where to begin on this.

The sound effects, on the other hand, are going to be far more impressive, as we are applying our own acting talents to bring the Press // Release Folk to life. Our players will be fully unsettled if we have anything to say about it (er... moan about it?).

The inclusion of a narrator character is also going to add some complexities, but I doubt it'll be a problem after some clever mixing. Justin says he's got a voice actor for the part, so that's one mystery solved.

I think the tone of our game is absolutely wonderful, but it does sort of defy conventional genre, and it will test both my skills as a musician and my access to proper instrumentation to bring any sort of music to the table.

Week 05: Hey SAW!

I'm not late this time. I'm learning.

So on Tuesday we basically set out to change everything about our game. As soon as we left the classroom I didn't know who I was anymore or what we had just discussed. In the moment changing everything felt so right, but later it just didn't seem to make complete sense. The new idea was definitely a fun one but getting it all done in a week seemed like a crazy idea (especially for our programmer).

We took time to think on it and basically, decided not to change everything, but to change everything. What I mean by that is that we're keeping our original idea, but adding this narrative to it that kind of changes everything about it in a good way.

We're adding a SAW like character to our game. The narrator. The narrator is to be presented as someone talking through the tablet. We're not sure yet who this character is or if we want them to have a face, but will hopefully discuss that at 3 today.

Brian said something interesting that I feel really resonates with our current changes. He mentioned the aspect of internet culture (mostly because the faces have that "meme" quality to them) and then talked about trolling. SO YEAH OK INTERNET WORDS ARE ALWAYS SO CRINGEY, but I don't have another word to fit this feeling. Our game essentially is pushing people to troll one another in a friendly but somewhat competitive magic circle. They are getting to know each other by each reaching this level of annoying at the same time.

I dunno, I think this all sounds wonderful. Maybe it'll all come crashing down when we start our meeting today, but as of right now, I'm feeling super good about this. We need to figure out how to represent the vocal prompts so they have a visual piece as well, because banking everything on the vocal aspect just ain't gonna fly with how tablets and party games work.

I'm excited for this! I think we can pull it off and have our rough demo by Tuesday. I'm really excited to see it all come together. We've got this team. I still love all of you, we're doing great things. Let's be strong, and make this baby come to life.

Week 05: "...."

The confusion continues.

It really does stem from our lack of direction, which further stems from the idea itself not having a clear lead. No one person came up with the idea -at least not that I can remember considering the versions it went through- so there was never one specific vision to follow. Instead, we kept trying to reshape the vision, coming up with new brilliant ideas that we just don't have the time for anymore.

In all honesty, there's a certain point within this project where I just lost the passion for it. The mess of ideas has been hurting productivity. That being said, I love getting people to playtest our game and seeing their reactions. People really do seem to enjoy it, but for short periods of time and when/if they know their score and who the winner is. Otherwise, it feels pointless because it's endless, there's no set time limit. We've tested so many things at this point and those may not be explicitly seen in our product because we keep taking things out, like the crowns.

I think I'm just burnt out from everything. Not just this project, just everything in general. Several different group projects, all with their own meeting times. Work. Mentoring. Playtesting. Various other obligations. I'm drowning.

But that's beside the point. I have to get my head back in the game.
And I think in order to do that, I have to have a firmer stance on things.

Week 04: OH NO I'M LATE AGAIN

WOW, WOW, WOW, WOW, WOW. Late AGAIN. What a fool I was. But I'm here now I guess. I can talk about some things.

So, we had a LONG meeting on Thursday and we came to some conclusions and then got rid of those conclusions and came up with NEW conclusions and then went back to an old idea from a while ago. That's generally how our meetings go, and I'm happy so long as we decide SOMETHING by the end.

We went back to Press Release Man. Did I ever talk about him? Press Release Man, PR man for short was a short lived dream of mine, a dream who became a meme, and now might become a reality, which is wild. We'll see. Animals are definitely cuter and easier to work with, but facial expressions are glorious and should be loved. ANYWAYS, so I got to bring him back. He Press, and he Release. Such a glorious man. I respect his attitude too. He's got his life figured out and is going places. SO YEAH! Wow my late post is all about PR man. Amazing. I might as well show the concepts for the cast then.  Original PR man on the left with his more colorful buddies.

Playtesting

Playtesting Participants:

Age	Gender	Major
21	F	Elementary Education
19	F	Accounting
19	M	Secondary Education: Mathematics
20	M	Game Design
19	M	Game Design
21	M	Game Design
21	F	Digital Cinema
20	M	Game Design
21	M	Computer Science
21	F	Animation

We’ve learned a number of things from playtesting. Players found the game intriguing, which is a good start. Our first playtests were set up in such a way that the players knew which speed they were playing on. Those speeds were low, medium, high, and extreme. Given a minute for each speed, the players determined that high and extreme were too quick and made the game utter chaos. However, when the speed changed dynamically the players didn’t pay much attention to it –and could not distinguish between the speeds. That being said, game length felt “about right” for many of our players but scoring was off. It was fairly difficult for our players to determine their scores. Some barely paid any attention to it for that matter.

Things we have to improve on are:

·         Our scoring system

o   We’re thinking of using a crown to show who the winning player is.

o   Another option is using 3 crowns to designate first, second, and third place. So far, that has proved to be a bit too much on screen. Some say the buttons now look like beyblades. Let it rip!

o   Getting rid of the score number altogether

·         Art

o   Having an ice background or a granite/countertop-like background has shown to make the most “sense” so to speak to players so far. And by that, we mean that players would understand why the buttons were moving in the way they were.

o   We’re planning to change up the art anyway. So far we’re going with ice, but we’re changing up the animals just a bit.

·         A mix of programming and design

o   Adding a menu screen

o   Adding a timer-like function that designates when the game ends

§  So far we’ve come up with “melting” the ice that the animals are encased in

§  Thus the person that melts (keeps their fingers on the buttons) the most is a clear winner

o   An end screen and/or pop-up that shows who won the game

Week 04: Leopards

I truly feel like these weeks are blurring all together. Week 5 is already rearing its ugly head, and alpha is approaching. Quite menacing!

Last week we further discussed the direction of art and mechanics. Specifically, I wrote a bunch of notes on UI, and plans of action that we could possibly take if playtesting finds that the current UI, well, sucks? I also made a wickedly sick leopard-print START button. It's possibly the pinnacle of my portfolio.

This week we had yet another of one of those tug-o-war debates/convos about our game, really trying to find the core of what we wanted to do. We reaffirmed (or maybe confirmed for the first time? GASP) in which direction we want to game to go, which I think is going to be more B.U.T.T.O.N than Warioware. For my tasks this week, I'm going to attempt to make a title screen and a win screen. And maybe also come up with a name. I don't understand how hundreds of thousands of parents a year come up with names for their newborns. I mean, what if you name your kid Chris but he's really a Chad? I feel the same here.

Anyways, I'm scared for the future! But it's fun! :)

Week 4: Batten Down the Hatches

The primary developments of our meeting today involved a departure from our microgame structure, allowing our game to evolve into a more simplistic, yet gratifying "mechanical bull" iteration. Though we were scourged with gradually less palpable ends and constant creative disagreements, the primary motivation behind this shift was the perceived misuse of our game's greatest strengths in the other configuration. In specific, our game's greatest novelty, and most inspiring source of enjoyment, is derived entirely for the interplayer physicality that our system provides. While the other direction had a great deal of merit (and I admittedly hope to pursue some of those ideas further beyond the confines of this class), we simply were not pushing the envelope of discomfort nearly enough.

Our new version provides players with frequent physical demands, which will either greatly inhibit the ability of the players to retain contact with their dots, or simply distract them and make them look foolish.  In addition to creating a spike in the difficulty, and by extension, prioritizing the most intriguing aspect of our game, this change also has a minor benefit of visibility- the players of this version will be far more ostentatious and will have far more exaggerated movements, which will draw the attention of more onlookers, and so on. I think this game is presently a far cry from being app-store-ready, but the potential is absolutely there, and the talent on this team is astronomical, so I think business-savvy considerations may have some merit.

Our cursory tests earlier today showed a great deal of promise, and as long as we don't shoot ourselves in the foot by making information unclear, I can only foresee the player experience getting stronger with every new addition.

Week 04: Why are names so difficult to come up with?

The game is coming along nicely so far. We've added plenty of the art assets at this point. Some work, some not so much. I've playtested what we have so far with others outside of class and outside of the game design major. It's great seeing others enjoying the game or at least becoming competitive with each other. We're still going to do some more, mainly A|B testing to see what features work and which don't.

Our score system is the main one that we have to figure out. Do we leave the numbers on the screen? Do we make a bar for each player to fill up? Do we not have anything at all just a crown indicating first place? These are the questions we're struggling with right now.

Oh, and what the title should be.
Finger Twister is a bit generic -though it does get the point across.
Baby Balls.... sounds bad, worse out of context. (To be fair, I have enjoyed onlookers confused faces when they hear it. But we probably shouldn't call it this. Just saying.)

Maybe we'll find something soon. Maybe it'll hit us like a brick wall by week eight. Who knows? For the time being, I'm just going to go with Finger Twister. We should just make up a word like Quiplash or Fibbage. Eventually, something will stick. For now, all aboard the struggle bus!


TL;DR Naming things is hard.
Back to arting.