The team had a very busy week. There was the half presentation where the team received plenty of feedback and we spent tons of time discussing among the members on the future working direction of the game for the remaining half semester. Couple of plans needed to be changed and the team must ensure strict development cycles to hand out a complete game by the end of week 14.
The predominant feedback received was the fact that the current design did not have enough elements that get people’s interest on the deming process. The team did come up with an effective story that increased the audience’s awareness on the landmine issues. However, it seemed like the whole game design was focusing on providing an engaging game experience instead of teaching the audience the process of deming. The team needed to work more on this point and come up with more elements that were both educational and fun.
For example, to add more educational elements into the game, the team created a new mini-game to mimic the real world situations where the deming robots were damaged by the landmines. Players needed to work with each other to rewired the damaged module so that the robots could be functional for a longer time.
Also, the team had a clear time line of the project for the remaining of the semester. The idea was to get the first 3D world playtest as soon as possible so that the team could get onto the next iteration of the design. At week 13, we would have a soft opening where the game should be roughly finished and wait for some final polish.
As for the engineering perspective of the game, it was coming along smoothly. Before next Monday, the engineers on the team planned to do some improvements on the current system based on the feedback from the half. Here is the detailed plan.
The general working direction was not changed. In the following weeks, the team planned to build weekly games to see the progress and playtest the levels with gamers to find out if the mechanisms worked or not.