We started this week with a new build ahead of playtesting with Marie-Claire (CEO of Women in Games). James spent a while making sure the quests were working and the scenes were all included whilst I worked on the UI for the menus. Unfortunately when playtesting the build on itch.io, there were multiple issues where the scenes weren't linking properly, not triggering conversations etc. so we have decided that I will be taking more of a lead on the programming work so that James can focus primarily on the 3D modelling.

 

After getting access to the project I had a meeting with Safwan (who has been very kind to help and has been credited in the game) and he helped me to implement the UI I made last week, as well as fixing some of the visual errors and aspect issues we had previously. I'm hoping this week James will be able to make the menu animation so that I can update the UI to be much clearer than it currently is - despite it being a massive improvement on the white text boxes before!

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On the Tuesday we spoke with Marie-Claire who showed a passionate interest in our games and personal goals post university. She seemed to think we had a strong idea and that we were right to keep the mechanics limited and focus on creating a smaller, more polished game. She suggested we bring ourselves into the marketing of the project by giving ourselves show personas, e.g. 

 

- Myself - The Lion Tamer or Acrobat - taming/juggling the various aspects of the project

- James - The Strongman - for producing core components of the game such as the coding and the 3D modelled assets

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And of course credits for others who helped us:

- James Stallwood (lecturer) and Safwan - The Magician and The Apprentice for their awesome help when coding and using Unity

- Ed - the composer, for his audio work 

- (NB. Kelly and Triya the voice actors - acrobats for juggling so many characters!)

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These were really interesting suggestions from Marie-Claire and it was great to have a positive conversation with her. It was the boost we needed to keep going this week!

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On the Wednesday we were back in the studio, taking images of the hand-sculpted assets for the photogrammetry and recording audio and video for our devlog. James will then be cutting these with screen captures, images, timelapses etc. to produce a short behind-the-scenes video.

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For our final meeting this week I worked with our lecturer to fix the issues with the scene linking, so now our snake charmer conversation triggers after the quest and after the conversation, the next level loads where she has disappeared to go and perform. I also managed to set up a scene for the fortune teller where the quick-change artist has left as well, so I think that's some really good progress. By editing the beginning and end narrative into cutscenes we can take the pressure off of the code and bring in more artistic elements which should ease up the workflow.

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