Hour Breakdown:

• 3.5 hrs lecture/presentations
• 10.5 hrs Code Jam and Scrum
  • Unified documents to use the same type of material shader, highlighting, and models
  • Took off extra colliders that were interrupting players from using the temple winches continuously
  • Fixed an event trigger in the temple for the billionth time
  • Made invisible ramps in the temple to give the player the ability to run over the fallen pillar and give the appearance of stepping over the piece of the broken gate
  • Updated temple geometry again
  • Updated the textures in the investigation room
  • Worked on fixing the z fighting that happens in the investigation room
  • Writing/Creating the final document of the game
• 3 hrs Friday playtesting and analysis
• 2 hrs working on the presentation slides and practicing
• 2 hrs updating the game with the latest textures
• 2 hrs fixing/writing in-game documents
• 2.5 hrs creating a different type of document game object that uses the actual document texture
• 1.5 hrs more updates to prefabs in the game(textures and placement)
• 4.5 hrs adding more objects to areas of the residential level that felt empty
• 6+ hrs going through pull requests from the team
• 4 hrs writing and placing documents at the temple entrance

Total: 41.5 hours

This week my work has mostly been making level design and “world building” improvements. While this breaks the “content complete” bounds of being in Beta, there are still a lot of narrative elements to the game that were pushed back from previous sprints, but were critical to the overarching narrative. While I’m aware that many players will never read through these documents, I would be disappointed with myself if I made a horror game with barely any lore.

 

Highs + Lows:

Having the last weekly playtest session

High: As usual, it was great to see people enjoying the game and giving us great feedback

Lows:

• At this point, we already know most of the bugs in the game, so most testing doesn’t tell us anything new
• With so many different coop player dynamics we are still finding design issues, but they would require a lot of time to fix, so we can’t do anything about it.

Having the last code jams of the quarter

Highs:

• With all the previous playtest data, we really know how to focus on fixing the most important issues during our jams
• One of our artists, Stephanie, brought salted caramels to our last jam and they were amazing

Lows:

• Everyone is really busy with other class finals and getting ready for the end of the quarter, so we never had a meeting where everyone could come
• I’m really going to miss working alongside my teammates.

Presentations

Highs:

• We got some great feedback from Jim and he really helped us improve our presentation for Thursday
• Most of the negative feedback we got had to do with known slide formatting issues and not with how we presented
• Seeing the other games present was great.

Lows:

• We didn’t have a Mac adapter the first day, so our slide formatting got wrecked when we transferred the presentation to a PC
• A lot of games, including ours, had videos/slides that looked way too dark; which wasn’t helped by the room lights being left on the whole time.