The last week has been all about pulling everything together and getting our game ready to show at the Swinburne Open Day, which is the coming Sunday.
This is going to be our first big public show of LVL2 so this is all quite exciting. And also a little scary!
We have three levels ready to go, and all of our mechanics set up and ready to play. We still need to do a whole lot of polish cos everything is in a very raw state at the moment.
Due to the fact that we have scrapped our previous game and started over from scratch over the winter break, we are essentially 12 or so weeks of development behind the other groups in the class. I think we’ve put in a pretty good effort to get ourselves back up to speed, but we are going to be showing a game that is significantly less polished and tested than our colleagues.
I’m going to be doing my best to keep this in mind as people play our game, but we’ll have to see how I go with that.
But before we get to that, we need to pull everything together.
Really all we still have to do is connect all of our levels together, test them, get some new audio and sound effects, make sure all of our art and assets are in place, build and implement a new UI system, get all of the menus and sub-menus plugged together and test everything as many times as possible.
Easy right?
Ahem.
The thing we’re going to have to concentrate on this week is making sure we know exactly what jobs need doing and exactly who is going to be doing them. On reflection this was a real problem last semester. A lot of times we would meet up as a group and find that various people had not done their tasks because they were waiting on somebody else to do something else, or they thought that it was someone else’s tasks, or any other number of excuses.
I’m also pretty concerned that a few people appeared to have just tapped out altogether. Now, whether this is a result of it being mid-semester break and them taking that 100% seriously, or whether it’s a case that they are just done with this project I don’t really know at this stage. Regardless, we pretty much have to move forward under the assumption that they are no longer contributing to the project and it’s on the rest of us to get everything done.
In other more cheery news (this under the line bit is quickly becoming my favourite) I have officially published a game!
It’s a narrative adventure that I made in Twine last year.
You can play it in your browser by going here: https://kipslife.itch.io/babel
It’s called Babel and is about an ill-fated archaeological party searching for the site of the Tower of Babel.
I also created my first ever Twitter bot. @Towns_of_Aus is a bot that tweets out facts about little known Australian towns twice a day.
It’s probably still a little repetitive at the moment, but I have some ideas about how to make it a bit better. It kinda reads a little bit like a Dwarf Fortress summary at the moment, so I’m gonna have to do some work to make it sound a bit more natural.
I made it using cheapbotsdonequick.com and it was really easy to set up and get running. I would recommend giving it a try!