Moving Forward
Well, today we challenged to move forward into the next section of Capstone, Proof of Concept and past Deep Dive. This past week has been about putting together all the things we need to qualify into moving forward.
We had already established the art pipeline effectively, so the next thing on the list was the audio pipeline. I took the main reins on that because I have built out audio pipelines before in other engines, and with the way that Unreal handles other assets, I figured it couldn't be too difficult. Before building the pipeline, though, I needed to do some research. Building a couch coop game, music and sound effects play a large role in the experience the player ends up having with the game. So I went through and listened to the OSTs of our main competitors to get an idea of what elements to utilize in our game. While upbeat tunes where a pretty frequent thing, we couldn't quite go for the same vibe. The reason behind this being that with our game going for a slight spooky vibe, something too upbeat would be off putting in comparison with the rest of the theming. So I took to finding some Creative Commons music that could act as placeholder in the mean time as we built out our own music. I listened to many tracks, trying to find something that would work not only for the theme of our game, but for games in general. Once I had all of the assets together, I was pleasantly surprised how easy it was to simply implement within the engine. The ease of access to the most complex options for sound in Unreal Engine will be a real benefit to our project as it allows us to do much more complex stuff then we could easily do in Unity.
We also did a hefty amount of QA this past week, testing our camera angles, sound, levels, and books in separate sessions. We also received not a single piece of negative feedback during our tests, which was a huge boon to the team. It is always energizing when the players you work so hard to entertain enjoy the game you make and want to keep playing. There were several occasions where players had to be physically stopped from playing anymore because they refused to stop. These QA sessions were, despite this, productive. Despite working with unexperienced testers, we were able to effectively extract useful feedback from the usual myriad of "add everything" feedback that young testers can be fond of by really focusing on directed questions. Our QA revealed what we sort of expected to see: the impressions of the books really determines on how the level is set up for players to interact with; the level had the majority of people feeling its medium difficulty while outlier found it easy or hard; our camera angle was going to be top-down; the music was an excellent fit for the game; etc. etc..
Then there were documents. Whether for the better or the worse, I tend to always complete those last on my list of things to do. For this particular instance, it worked out for the better. Without the stress of all my other work coming down on me, I was able to really think not only about the content of the documents, but also the actual design of the documents themselves. While my documents have always been functional and have always been well received, they haven't been something that I could look back and be proud of. So this time, I really put forward my best effort on this to create something that not only would serve my team, but would be something that I could really be proud. And suffice it to say, I was successful. I honestly believe this is one of my best design bibles ever, and am actually excited to make further developments on it.
And, of course, the icing on the cake was that we did make it through to Proof of Concept. Our team was once again able to go through easily and we were praised for our presentation and design plan. We have already made our plan for the next Sprint and I can't wait to push forward even more.