 Today is the day! My team, The League of Evil, presents our Capstone Project, Capital Vice, to the entire school.  It is honestly a mixed bag of emotions for me. I am excited to show off all of the awesome tools and systems that my team worked on this past semester, but I am also nervous as not every team will make it through as the professors have to cut down to less games for next semester. I have enjoyed every minute working with my team this past semester, and I honestly could not have asked for a better group of people to spend just about every waking moment with for an entire semester. Hopefully all goes well for us tonight with the presentations. Come Tuesday I will be flying back home to Texas for Thanksgiving break, so my role is pretty much done. On Tuesday Night after the Demo Session we will find out if we get to keep going on this wild adventure for another 5 months. If it is the case my next post will be excited and happy and all about our expanded team and our new goals, but if not it will be a postmortem of everything that my team accomplished this semester. Until then I can only give the best presentation of my life, and hope for the best. As they say in Vegas, Have a truly Golden Knight!
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 It is honestly hard to even begin to talk about everything that has gotten done this week because we’ve been working full force on the game since Thursday night after QA. This week was focused on bug fixes and player agency. We have changed so much so quickly that it is becoming almost impossible to keep track of what we have done without looking at backlogs. While this is cool and exciting, it also is incredibly scary at the exact same time. This blog post literally marks the beginning of the end. We only have sprints 11 and 12 remaining, and neither of them are full sprints for our team since for sprint 11 Ellie will be in Mass from Friday to Sunday, and Dustin (along with myself) will be in Montreal from Sunday to Tuesday. Sprint 12 we only have from our usual Thursday start date until Sunday the 18th. (This is due to the Capstone Presentations being on that next day, Monday the 19th.) Dustin also just wrote a post that is incredibly important that pertains to this week (and more specifically last night) and he describes what Champlain’s specific crunch is like. (LINK) While I don’t stay up nearly as late as Dustin on most work session nights I definitely am there until pretty late in the morning. Dustin is also great at knowing when to end work sessions or sending me home because I am losing my mind due to it being early in the morning. Thankfully we have really only done these late nights the past 2 weeks and have been pretty good about getting everything we need done at normal hours of the day. I am also about to begin working on editing our gameplay footage. One of the coolest things about our game is the absolute massive amount of footage we have lying around from every QA session. We are going to frame the video part of our pitch as a basic match of our game, but it is going to start off from Sprint 1 and progress to (hopefully depending on what footage we get this next week) Sprint 12. Our game is really rooted in our rapid iteration process and we change things after literally every QA session. It will be fun to show off how our game evolved overtime, and how our workflow will keep it evolving if we are to make it through to the next semester.
 Tons of fun things have happened with our game this week! We added in our final remaining features. First up is the task system. Tasks are a way to level up the Vegas Act abilities so the players feel like they are accomplishing something while going after Greed. These level ups increase damage, decrease cooldowns, and more. There isn’t a ton of feedback with it quite yet but the backbones are there! The other remaining feature we added in is the ability for Greed to pick up and throw other players. When we first added this it was incredibly buggy (albeit the bugs were hilarious), but after a few QAs it is now working almost flawlessly. The main idea for this came when we realized we needed more player interaction other than just shooting each other. Chunking another player across the map is so satisfying and giving players the ability to do it just made sense.  Something we also have started doing is implementing environment art and textures! Gone are the days of gray walls and in with the red! Ellie has also started texturing the characters as well. Gone are the days of blue figures!
Overall we are now aiming to make our game have as much player feedback as possible to make our game as fun as humanly possible. We are also beginning to test out and use Dustin's YOGURT (Your Own Games User Research Tool) so we can see where players are going in our game to help guide the level design. More on YOGURT at Dustin's Website  |
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