Trial of Concepts

Week Five

(From 3D to In-Engine)

At the beginning of this week, I spent time making sure the level I wrote about last week was ready for our team's first play-test. Most of the work was just breaking up the map into appropriate pieces and learning how to get those into Unity. Once that was all finished, the map was turned into a play-test ready level in Unity. Check out the screenshots in the gallery below!

When the map was finished, I moved on to a quick 3D sketch of the main cannon model to use as a placeholder for the play-test. You can see some concept art for it here, a post from a couple weeks ago. We didn't end up needing this particular version of the model for the play-test, however.

After both of these projects I moved onto PR tasks. With regards to PR, our game finally has a Facebook page! Over the end of last week and weekend, we settled on the name "Aimless", stylized as AIM<. A logo and composite image was handed off to me and I was able to create a banner image and profile picture for Facebook. This page will serve as a websites of sorts for the immediate future. All of our teams dev blog links are there and we will be posting regular updates on the games progress. Check it out and follow AIM< from start to finish!

Finally, on Wednesday our team hosted the first closed play-test of AIM<. 16 individuals played the game and provided feedback. The players had a blast playing with the games mechanics and told us what they liked, what they didn't, and areas they felt needed improvement. This data was gathered through a post play-test survey. Overall, the players found the fun, which is awesome.

Last night and today I digitized all the feedback we received so that our team can refer to it throughout the next sprint. Not only did I learn a lot about the way players were approaching AIM<, I also figured out what sort of data would be good to gather in future play-tests. Using this information, I updated the post play-test survey and branded the form with with our games logo.

This weekend will be spent pouring over feedback and approaching the games design to enhance the aspects of fun.

Big stuff coming for AIM<. I hope you all have a great weekend!