We made some decent progress on our game this week and made some important decisions. First of all, I was elected the designer of the game. So the 100% pay raise was really why I did it (that's still $0). Seriously though, I was happy to take the job and its nice to have that job title's direction. I'm still currently implementing the Wiki (it's been a busy week, for everyone) but it seemed fairly unanimous that I was the person for the job, and its nice to know that I instill that confidence in people. We also decided that we wouldn't have a second designer. In this way, there's one person who deals with the tough decisions and does the work to get the design written down and figured out. Everyone else on the team is basically the second designer. We also decided that Brianne would be the Product Manager, and she'll be making sure we keep ourselves in check in regards to the scope of the design and the target of our design. So she'll focus on questions like "Who is the audience?" or "Would the audience want this feature?" or "What platforms does our audience want to play on?" I think the entire designer role brainstorm turned out really well, and everyone seems to be pretty happy about the situation.
Tuesday was EAE day, where the Capstone undergrad students and Cohort 2 got to show off their finished games, and we in Cohort 3 got to show off where we were in our game creation process. This was actually super helpful to get some outside playtesting in. I basically sat in the backroom and watched people play Vinyl for about 4 hours. It was great. I tried to go out to "network" as much as I could, but I was much more concerned with how people played our game than making contacts. I'll make contacts when I make something worth showing, but right now I'm trying my best to make something people want to play. I did wander around the room a few times, but most people were a little preoccupied with the finished games of course.
So what was the result of the feedback? Most people did not like our lack of gameness. JP, who was on the industry panel, didn't like the new direction. He missed the pitch modulation (which is coming back in; it was just broken for this build) and he felt like he could just hit buttons in a different program and get the same effects, without playing a game. And he's totally right. I wrote a fairly large playtest email last Sunday (after my last blog post) that said a lot of the same things. We've just lost the fun of the original prototype somewhere along the way, but that's okay. Better to know now what doesn't work than 6 months from now. The overall theme of the playtesting on EAE day was "What am I doing? What am I supposed to be doing? And what do the lasers do?"
So the lasers. Those don't work for me. Basically, I would see the rail to grind on the side of our pipe, attempt to get to it, and get blocked by a stupid laser on the way. Last weekend I added the ability to grind on lasers, using Jason K's code to grind on rails and modifying it slightly. It worked really well I thought, but I didn't want to upload a new build right before EAE day, so we still need to playtest that. But we have to do something with those lasers.
Anyway, a short post today. Finals week is next week and I have a few papers to finish up. We have a plan for the next week with a new sprint and it should be a good start to the summer work. See you next time.
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