Sprint 11: Finish Line In Sight

Were almost there! One week remains before the studio wide pitch next Monday. We’ve made a ton of progress this past week: crowd reactions to hype events, UI updates, more animations, physics changes, advertisements in the background, and on top of all that we added a new mechanic: parrying. Gameplay footage can be seen below:

We took this build to QA and here are some of results:

Players are loving the overall feel of the game and are having a ton of fun; however, they still aren’t utilizing the ropes as much as we want them to. We have been trying to add more incentives to use the ropes. We have been looking into UI action prompts, and we are also refining how we communicate the ropes as mechanics to the players. All of this is part of the iterative process and we do feel like we are getting better results each week.

Lets talk planning. Development-wise for this sprint, it is pretty light. We have been keeping on track with our semester plan and revising it after each sprint. We are all set for a code freeze at the end of this week and it looks like we aren’t going to be crunching! We are happy with where the game is at and all we really need to do at this point is add some polish.

As far as our presentation is going, we are feeling pretty good about it. The slides are all in order and we’ve been practicing our skit in the auditorium for a month now. The trailer has a lot of placeholder footage right now and is still waiting on some final visual polishes in-game. In the next 2-3 days the game should be in it’s final visual state for this semester and all those place holders will get replaced.

We don’t know yet what will happen to us after the pitches next week. We will be able to demo our final build of Lucha Megadrive to Champlain College faculty for a brief moment the day after our pitches. We bring our game to QA every week, so we are experienced and comfortable explaining our game, watching people play it, and receiving feedback on it. The team is still a bit nervous. The power to decide if we get to keep developing our game is in the faculty’s hands. We have been doing everything we can to boost our chances and form a convincing argument for our continued development. We are all super anxious and excited for the presentations and demos. It is going to be great to see the work of all of the other Champlain College seniors. I wish everyone the best of luck!