Alpha Week

This week has been busy as usual, we started out Monday morning with going up on stage to practice our GGC presentations. It went rather well, we definitely need to prepare more and keep working on our presentation but it seemed as we had gotten further with our presentation than some of the other teams. The point of this presentation was to show what we had ready at the moment and get some valuable feedback on what we might want to add, remove or change. We got some really good advice and immediately made changes, both inspired by the feedback and by other teams. We did feel that it was challenging to create the presentation considering how unfinished the project still is and I think it will be changed even more before the big one at the GGC.

For the presentation I created a PowerPoint presentation and a PowerPoint template that we will use for all presentations in the future, I also created a PowerPoint presentation for the Alpha presentation we had today.

This week I also created a foot for the totem pole, since it looked a bit like it was floating on the game space. I thought it would be a good idea to have it for the Alpha and following playtesting session to aid the audience and the players to understand our vision since there had been some people pointing it out before. This is how it looks at the moment, there are also some new art assets created by our other artist that has been placed to make the gameplay more interesting and to decorate the background.

Since the original placeholder art and animation for the gatherers did not look right I created a new one. It needs some polishing but it looks very comical which was exactly what I was aiming for. Previously they had really long legs which took up about half of their frames, I thought it would be better to make the bodies smaller in comparison to the masks and scale them up while cutting their legs at their knees. (The original placeholder can be seen in the mockup above). Here is how it turned out.

I have also been looking at the power-ups this week, I created two placeholders as we needed them when showing the Alpha, although they will need to be iterated since they did not turn out as I wanted. I had an idea that I wanted to test but they did not really fit the art style, they looked more like they would belong in the game we designed last semester called "With Love...". They did however look well enough for the Alpha and were implemented, we will have to figure that out when we start completing all placeholders next week. We want all art to be complete prior to the Beta so that the programmers have time to implement it and still have time to work out any issues and finish balancing the game and controls.

Late the night before the Alpha presentation the Lead Programmer asked me to make a quick win text that he could place on a white background. I quickly created four winner texts and a background (that was not white) to use for placeholders, so that we would have something, although in the end he unfortunately did not find the time to implement them. At the moment it is just text but we will change that later, perhaps have a a text saying "wins" or "winner is" and then have the mask or the character appear next to it.