Week 24: Principal development is rounding up

 This week we are finalising the third sprint for Analysis Paralysis. The last days we have shown our demo’s to our launching clients and they were very enthusiastic!

We are excited with the product so far but next week will be decision week. That is when we will host three separate playtest with participants from separate companies. This is where all our efforts will be put to the test. In the meanwhile, let us update you on some things we did:

Slicing the final features into a playable version of the game.

 This week it all came together: code, front-end, back-end, the database and the game design. It is in this process where also do extensive systems testing ourselves. Our dedicated testers came up with some bugs and errors but nothing to extensive so far. While we are testing it ourselves we always find interesting design errors which have missed some checks. That is not a flaw of the team but a natural thing to occur. It is very hard to always communicate what you mean and only when it is build we see how sometimes our minds work completely different. It’s all about communication and that’s what we love about this job. But nothing to worry about. Let’s see what the players come up with next week.

Reshooting the introduction video.

For the physical game we had an introduction video where the player is introduced in the mystery and the CEO of BrightBase (the in game fictional company) asks for your help. This original video was technically good and the performance of the actor was brilliant. but we also got some feedback that having a white male CEO is not so progressive or ‘fresh’ as it could be. And we totally agree! That is why we reshot the video this week introducing Jessica Anderson as our companies CEO.

Content, content, content.

Above does not mean happy, happy, happy.. No it means that it was also time to get the game content organized and properly written. Since we already had a physical game we could use a lot of the original content. But then again, a digital game is also completely different and we had to write a lot of new lines. For this we work with a content document where each line of content and its position is written down.

Most of it is to provide the proper level of user experience for the game. Although you want the players to make their own choices they still need some onboarding and scaffolding in the game to help them on their way. Short lines and the right moments can make all the difference. Next week in our test we will know whether we did a good job.

That was it for this week. Next time we will update you on how we fared in the playtests.