Design was focused on interdisciplinary meetings this week, with less focus on design work outside of QA and some passes at documents. An important new thing this week was the second concept, Big A.I., which we were able to show at QA.
Met with programmer
During my meeting with our programmer, we covered the systems needed for Big A.I. and worked alongside each other on the prototype. I focused on a design document I made for Big A.I. while the programmer filled out the details of the systems list and worked in engine a bit.
Met with artist
During my meeting with our artist, we both found the scale of the assets he has created thus far, and we created a top down layout for the new level that we wanted to start testing with. For the rest of the meeting, I finished the design document I previously mentioned while our artist continued building out the level with the assets he has. This resulted in the mansion that we used for QA.
QA
This week, we went to QA twice. Our producer attended the first one on 10/13, which I was busy for, and came back to me with positive results. There was, unfortunately, an “infinite evidence” bug that allowed players to get as much evidence as they want.
We also went to QA on 10/15, where we tested our second concept for the first time. While testers were interested, the gameplay seemed to be very unfair since the creature would be able to 1. See the player through walls and 2. Not play sounds if they were inside of a wall, even while close to the player.
Overall from QA, I think that all the most common issues were due to builds being finished right before QA. And this is not to say the programmer is at fault, since he had two prototypes to work on this week. So moving forward, we need to decrease the amount of work on the programmer, or adjust it so that there is time before QA to catch issues like these and clean up the build while thinking about the player experience. I am also still confident about the concepts since both showed 100% for testers being excited for the future of the game, which is a positive sign.
Documents - Intent Statement and Design Risk Lastly, this week I tackled the Intent Statement and Design Risk Assessment. I had meant to work on these earlier in the week, it turned out that I worked on them later than I had intended. I do not feel that these documents came out as well as I liked. For example, the design risk assessment is rather dry at the moment, and only covers very general issues I see when thinking about each concept. But, I think some ganders back at the research we have done will help inform where our ideas came from and the design risks we had discussed previously. The same is the case with the intent statement, looking at where we came from will help inform the kind of game we have been trying to nail this entire time.
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