Dev Update #2

Every week, I’ll be asking our wonderful developers to give us an update on what they’re working on. This week will focus on a huge milestone of ours: our first internal demo playtesting experience!  Stay tuned for more weekly updates every Wednesday! ~e

Andrue: This week in development we learned a valuable lesson; play-test early and often! Major implementations occurred, including the spectrometer view, the solar panels, and the battery! The owners apparently didn’t like our implementation of the Rover Harlem Shake, so we had to go back to the drawing board on movement. Looking forward to this next week!

Sledge: Our development team worked hard this last week to deliver our first internally produced demo for testing. They did a great job! While there are a lot of functional improvements to the game, we were able to locate some problems with the gravity and movement functions that greatly impede playability. So our focus for this week has shifted from working on our next set of features, to trying to get some fixes into the core mechanics. Our next internal demo will simplify the game world significantly and focus on playability.

Meanwhile, in preparation for upcoming features that will be added to the game once we straighten out the player control, we’ve added updates to our Game Design Document to, including details on the quantity of resources generated at nodes, additions to crafting and base upgrades, and the detailing of menu interfaces for interactions with the player character and base.

We also received some updated concept art, and have begun work on designing the visual layouts for our inventory and status overlays. Look for more information on the art side in our most recent art update!

Eric: It is I, the one who sets up these weekly updates!  This week has been hit pretty hard by midterms so things slowed down just a little bit, but I’m really impressed that our programmers have managed to pass such an awesome milestone this week.  Things were definitely a little shaky (as in driving around involves violent shaking) and need to be improved, but we’ve learned from this experience and that’s what matters.  Above, you’ll see a screenshot I took of our spectrometer view!  It’s not going to stay that way (it looks like a Gungan bubble shield), but it was fun to see its first iteration!