9/28 Progress Blog

All: We all met on Friday 9/22 to attempt to finalize an end goal product after receiving tons of feedback. We concluded with an idea that attempts to combine some skill with some acts of randomness to make for more interesting gameplay and replay ability. Essentially, the game is now about watching the zoo keeper's movements and actions and deciding what to do in accordance to them. Some of the keeper's actions increase his awareness of your actions as the turtle, so you must plan accordingly. However, there is still some randomness involved because each zoo keeper instance has a probability of him noticing your behavior, and the probability of him noticing you increases as you hold onto children's arms for longer periods. That being said, if you get extremely lucky, you can keep beating the odds and remain unnoticed for quite some time before being caught.
EG: One of the zoo keeper's actions is him looking at his phone. When he looks at his phone, he has a 75% chance of going back to sleep, and a 25% chance of noticing you biting children. The longer you bite a child, the more narrow your window of not being discovered becomes. One second makes your odds go from 75/25 to 65/35, and another second reduces your odds to 55/45, etc. You have the chance of getting lucky even as your odds become more difficult, but the randomness adds more difficulty and intensity. There is thrill in not knowing exactly what your actions will do.  

Mark: Continued to compile sounds to the library. Though it has gotten larger, some of the sounds have to be edited to be usable. For this upcoming version of the game Kelly has asked to focus on specific sounds and make them sound good. Examples are the child screaming and the sounds of the turtle snapping. Also talking to the others they wanted to add VO to the game to indicate things like streaks of the length of time you are holding on to the child. Finally I cleaned up and compiled the most needed sounds that we set to be due this week. 

Kelly: I played around with our environmental layout and game screen, trying to get the most effective view for the play style. I want the game to be correctly proportioned for the most satisfying gameplay, but also not too clustered to make for unnecessary distractions. I also tried to harmonize our environment with our turtle more, wanting to make the styles match more fully. Each week the style becomes more pronounced, but there is more work that can always be done. As producer, I also helped to keep our team on track and keep our game idea in scope. We were given lots of great feedback, but in just 10 weeks, we need to choose the battles we can afford to fight rather than accepting every great idea thrown our way. We need to stay in scope, and it's one of my jobs to try to keep that possible while still taking feedback into account. I also started to make our team shcedule, which is posted here on Blogger as well.

Justin: Fixed some bugs in the programming and clarified what type of feedback we want to put in as a team. Also put in a new scoring system as well as updated the animations for the zookeeper. The zookeeper's animation now directly affects if the player is going to be caught or not.

Adnan: After we decided to make the Zookeeper character's signals to the player more diegetic, I worked on the Zookeeper some more and got key poses for all of his reactions. The foundation for all his animations is done.

Alex: Focused on fleshing out the main UI mechanics. Worked on possible meta game implementations with the kids in the game as well as how we could further enhance the game play surrounding the zookeeper. Created a mockup screen of what the final game might look like with UI.