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.

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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.