The most noticeable work that had been done this week was to conduct the first play test to test out the game mechanism. The team mainly wanted to test out two game mechanisms. The first being the landmine detection system and the other one being the interaction of an elder lady walking through the landmine field to add some narrative elements into the game. There were two approaches for playtesting.
The first approach was to use google spreadsheet to simulate a board game that could be GMed by one group member and played by two players. The spreadsheet could use some logic to automatically calculate landmine detection results and actions points.
The idea behind this approach was to design a board game that had the game mechanism the team wanted to put into the actual video game. By doing this, the team did not have to come up with a code base and playtesting process could be way faster.
The second approach is an engineering solution to the board game approach. Basically the engineers on the team converted the game mechanism in the first approach into codes. It had exact same gaming features as the board game one but everything was automatically handled by a python program. This was the ideal approach for all the following playtests since it was more efficient.
One issue with this approach was the fact that the program’s print outs were hard to read for non-programmers. So the next step the team needed to work on was to construct a graphic UI system for the python program so that it could be friendlier to the general public.
Finally the team came up with some sketch images of how the game should look at from a computer screen using Minecraft. One of the next task for the team was to create some concept arts that showcase the robots and possible some NPCs in the game.
Here is a look up image when the robot was trying to dig out a mine.
More 2D concept arts showing the layout of the game.