JA 10/26

This week I spent a lot of time in engine with our programmer tweaking numbers and making sure everything feels write. I wrote a list of all the "minor events" that we wanted to get in by updated alpha, and made sure everyone had something to work on going into Thursday. For this weekend I'm going to keep tweaking in engine, as well as come up with more minor events and polish the events that we do have.

JA 10/19

This past week I spent most of my time playtesting and figuring out how to use the results of the playtest. I had some great luck that most of the people playtesting were able to dive very deep into the game, and did so in a way that allowed me to understand how people interacted with the game. After figuring out what direction we needed to push for Alpha, the whole group got together and spent several hours polishing the game to get it ready for Alpha presentations. Moving forward, I will be doing more playtesting and working closely with our Programmer in order to make sure design and implementation are on the same page.

Michael Whitten 10/19

This week we added a bunch of new art assests and events to the game. We did a lot of play testing and got a lot of useful feedback from all the players that played. A lot of them were struggling on how to trigger certain events.

We also had a very long discord meeting in which Tyler screen shared his screen while on game maker, and we were all giving suggestions to the game about events and art. We will be screen share calling more in the future as it helped us get a lot done just over the internet.

Set Dressing - Zach 10/12

Though we still have some design challenges ahead of us,

we're starting to focus in on our final style

JA 10/12

This past week has been mostly design elements rather than production. I have been focused on pushing the mechanics of our game in order to get an even deeper playtest to see how people react to our more in depth mechanics. Creating events that fall into our new categories (dependent and choice events), attempting to expand the environment, and shaping the assets that we do have has been my work this week. Pushing into next week, I will be running playtests, using that feedback for future design decisions, and really filling out the extra space thats in our game.

Playtest for 10/10

Safety in Embers Playtesting Report:

This round of playtesting showed us that the main elements of our game are working as intended. Players feel relaxed, if a little scared of the dark environment, and they enjoy the pacing of the game allowing them to become immersed in the environment. The small scale event system we have in place was enjoyed, and playtesters wish there was more of an emphasis on it asking for both visual and audio cues when events are happening. The events we currently have in place are satisfying, but not to the degree that our playtesters would like. This week we are going to begin experimenting with a more dynamic event system in order to give a little more depth to the vignettes that break up the scene. There were some mixed feelings about the control scheme of mashing spacebar taking the player out of the scene, but another player really liked the futility of attempting to relight the fire after it’s gone out. Other players were confused in general about the game, however, with this style of non-gamified gameplay this is unsurprising. Players also loved the changing of the scene based on the size of the fire, so adding more meat to the core of our game will be the focus moving forward into Alpha.

Potential changes moving forward:

           More player interaction

           More emphasis on events (i.e. cues etc.)

           More audio feedback

More events

Deeper events

Flesh out the events already in the game

More dynamic sound

Less confusion in “goal” and events

Expanding and populating the scene

Brainstorm control schemes

Michael Whitten 10/7/17

This week we had some new art assets be made along with some new sounds. I am working on a multiple layer track that loops and different instruments will be cutting in and out of the song reacting with the environment.

We also had a very big sit down to talk about the goal of the game, what is the main drive for the fire. Why is the fire there, what is its purpose? These are all things we are trying to figure out, and we are at the stage of development trying to find meaning behind it all.

JA 10/5

This past week I've spent administrating the process of moving into the next build, figuring out specifically which events we're going to implement, as well as spending time working on unique ways for the events to trigger. I have begun to construct a work schedule for the rest of the quarter and will spend this weekend fleshing it out.