Week 5/6: Weekly Assessment

Dates for Meetings:
The main meeting this week was the one I had with Scott on Thursday, October 11th. The game board complete, we ran a small crash test session, in which we found a few things that were wrong with our game.

First of all, the game was far too long. We went through 3 rounds (out of 5) and that took about an hour. We attributed this to the game board’s grid –it was far too large. So, we decided to shrink it three columns.

Secondly, the character attributes and food cards were vague and somewhat confusing (at least, to me). It took a long time for Scott to “sink” one of my characters, even though he had an additional turn. This was mostly due to the element of chance. We decided we either had to change the attributes or remove them. The food cards also didn’t help the players in the game.

Finally, the number of turns per round was limiting. By the time we used up our turns, all the status effects would vanish and the opponent’s character would still be standing. We decided to allot a larger number of turns so that the chance of eliminating characters was higher.

Accomplished this Week:
I have accomplished the following for this week:
• Basic concept art for all characters
• Came up with levels and assigned the characters to their respective levels
• Tested the game
• Took observation notes for playtest session

Tasks for Next Week:
My main task for next week is to continue doing concept art. I’ll be working on the character and level concept art and also write up background stories for each character. The team has realised we need to define the poses for each phase of the character throwing food in order to animate it properly. We want about three set frames –the starting pose, the throw, the end pose –and the program fill in the rest.

On a personal level: thus far, I’ve been creating the art traditionally –with a pencil and paper. While that’s good for getting the basics down, I’d like to move on to creating them digitally in a program like Photoshop or Flash.