Semester's End Is Looming -- Week Ending 1 Dec

The goal for the last couple weeks of the semester is to ensure that we have the best possible product to show off at the EAE Open House on 6 December. Though it's no secret that many students in the cohort had a bit of shift in focus once we submitted to IGF (other classes and homework have to get done sometime!), we've still been hard at work polishing and optimizing the experience of our game. The open house is next week, so much of this week was spent making the game easier to learn, thus giving players the greatest possibility of experiencing all that the game has to offer in a relatively brief play session (at the open house, we don't expect players to have the time to play for more than five or ten minutes).

Here's what I did this week:

- Assisted in getting the new color palette implemented. Might be a little bright for our tastes, but we want Craig to look at it for critique
- Got all text tips implemented into the game. They are present on load screens, various stages of menu pages, etc.
- Wrote the text for trap descriptions and put them on the trap store screen. These act as quick reference for players when they're deciding what traps to purchase for the oncoming level.
- Fixed the functionality of broken lava pits. This involved working in Unity to adjust some prefab settings, resizing objects, and digging through the nitty-gritty of some numbers and values.
- Tested trap functionality like crazy. Suggested tweaks to certain collision detections (which were implemented by the engineers), modified the design of trap launch trajectories, etc. Also tweaked the rate at which Dodos learn specific traps and then break or avoid them.

Just a couple more days till we're set to go! We're excited to get the public's feedback, including suggestions and comments from industry professionals that will be attending. Wish us luck!

- Troy