Winter 2014 Week 8

This past Saturday was SCAD Day, a sort of "open house" for prospective students and their parents at our school, so we set up a playtest session to be able to have people whom we've never met before and have never seen our program get a chance to play our game and get some feedback. We used the same build as we did last week so we could get a comparison of the kind of comments we received from last week with our fellow students and coworkers. Overall, from an outsider's perspective, our game is relatively strong from a design standpoint and quite strong artistically. It was interesting to compare the numbers of people noticing our first memory shard because the people who knew less about our game were more inclined to explore it. They didn't however, seem to take much of the narrative away from the game, but that's understandable because we're still not in a state where our narrative elements have been implemented.

The programmers have made some headway on the build. The Xbox controller has been fully mapped and integrated into the game with any the UI left to sync up to the new control scheme. The only reason why we didn't use it for the playtest is because the camera has somehow zoomed in really close to the player character, so the player would have been unable to see. More development on that soon, but Dissonance, from a technical standpoint, is progressing swimmingly.

Chapter 2 has a level diagram now and Alex, our level designer, is in the process of blocking it out. We also have Nicole, one of our artist, developing a tutorial level to take place before chapter 1 and show the player what the objective is in a more natural learning environment. Other members of our team have been working on their own level ideas, so our level design has had all hands on deck this past week.

Nicole, Jeff, and Brice have been working on UI layouts and illustrations to take the place of what we have so far. Still no pause menu yet, but we have a working main menu as a placeholder as well as a restart screen for whenever the player dies or finishes the current level. We're expecting that we'll at least have placeholders for every screen we need within the next two weeks with final designs to be integrated sometime in the spring.

Lastly, production has begun for the sound design on Dissonance and we have reached out to the people at Berklee College of Music in Boston to develop our soundtrack. Jeff has been building our sound library and will begin mixing and integration in the spring.