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This week went really well! Communication was at an all time high between team members, and bugs were easily found and squashed. The Embark system in particular was pretty challenging, but everyone did a great job pivoting to high priority tasks to make sure everything was running smoothly for testing.
As for myself, I spent a lot of time working on documentation and meetings. We’re trying to get designers out of documentation and into the build, so I finished up a lot of the remaining docs to ensure an easy transition next sprint. One of the biggest systems I planned out was the Town Expansion. This was touched on last week but we didn’t expand due to conflicting visions. This week I sat down with the design and art team and we talked about what we wanted this system to look like. I was a little concerned about scope, but I think we got something that works for everyone. After that, I sat down with the lead artist and we planned out how a new town would look. This was really fun, since we had a set list of all the features the town needed, and we were easily able to compare reference images to make the perfect new town. Images for that can be found in the slideshow below.
Also, we challenged greenlight this week! Last week we unfortunately didn’t have the resources to challenge out, but everything came together this week. The major thing to take away from the challenge is how we derisked all the high risk features and stories. For designers specifically, showing information visually and clearly was, and remains, out biggest obstacle. Through the new Embark system, the planned Billboard system, and various UX/UI features we have planned out, we feel like there is enough to properly derisk this. Also, we are going to start the tutorial now! The tutorial is going to be explained though a Mayor character, and I think that it’ll help with a lot of the confusion we’re seeing at QA testing. Once we can get that working, I think our game will be much more accessible to a new player.
We also derisked the quest creation system. Previously, I had designed the system of quest generation, tagging, and displaying, but it never got iterated on. Going into this semester with our new team, this was something we wanted to tackle. The previous system had trouble dealing with weird grammar, tenses, and pronouns, so a new system is required to make it easier and more viable to write better flowing content. The narrative designers on the team came up with a new system that will help them write new and cohesive procedurally generated content. Combine that with a quest tag replacement tool that one of the programmers wrote, and writing content for Guilded should be incredibly easy. It’ll be implemented in the next two weeks so hopefully we’ll see a boom of written content soon!
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