HAPPY THANKSGIVING from all of us here at Prediction Error! We’ve had a busy week of travel, rest, eating, and, yes, even a little bit of game development.
Most Notably, we have a first draft of a promo video! We had tons of fun planning and shooting this, and we’re looking forward to the finished product. Have a look below:
The programming team fixed a few bugs, tweaked some interactions, oh, and introduced the accusation mechanic. That’s right: you can now tell Madeline you think she murdered her ex-husband.
The art team is still cranking away at models and concepts.
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UI work included an iteration on in-world text.
In World Text
And we’re all back and ready to work hard through the end of the term (and the end of the year!)
It’s been a hectic week for the Prediction Error team. With impromptu meetings, weekend trips, swim meets, filming logistics, bugfixing, and just about every other thing you could think of, we’ve made steps forward in every main area this week and about a few dozen other non-main areas.
Art: Modeling is progressing well, and our artists have made wonderful progress on environment and character art.
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Programming: BUGS ARE FIXED! Issues with the database connecting to the build and the bouncing walls have both been resolved thanks to Samara’s hard work. An accusation system is in the works and is on schedule to be finished next week as planned. The piano puzzle has been revamped and works more consistently. And the new tracks from the sound team have been implemented!
Design: The puzzle progression has moved beyond “first draft” state, and our design team is working hard to get this finalized and polsihed so our game is, well, good.
Sound: The sound team produced four different brass lines to be used depending on Madeline’s opinion of the player. These include tracks for four attitude states:
This week, the Prediction Error team decided it would be wise to run a playtest session over the weekend to get a sense of how we’re doing in terms of getting mechanics to a playable state, creating puzzles that players can interpret, and correctly handling small details such as player size.
This decision led to the need for a large amount of work from every team member, and we were thrilled that we could get the prototype to a point where we could watch others play through it.
This was, indeed, a valuable session – we found bugs, realized where our players were under-informed, and took note of the major issues that needed to be fixed. Additionally, it forced us as a team to make sure everything each individual had been working on worked together – which can sometimes be a very frustrating process.
Saturday’s playtest.
We made lots and lots of progress this week, so here’s a brief rundown:
Design:
We may have mentioned this already, but we ran a playtest and identified areas in which this project needs to improve.
Dan Shalala
Sydney Oswald
Chris Lucas
Joseph Brown
Art:
We have a greyboxed character!
Our pipeline has been drafted and is in the process of being tested.
First assets for the room and puzzles were created.
The art team is prioritizing models and UI design that are essential to the game and its puzzles.
Programming:
We did a partial overhaul of the piano puzzle, which still needs some work.
Samara created a Mastermind-style “front door” puzzle.
Samara integrated draft audio into the player conversation with Madeline.
Samara added different options in conversation that affect Madeline’s opinion of the player.
Erin extended this into adjusting the volume of the brass line in the soundtrack.
Samara prepared the biowall puzzle.
Erin brought it into the prototype.
Erin began work on murder board line drawing.
Sound:
Our sound team has sent over a sample track, and we’re so happy with how it sounds!
The protoype is less broken, art is being created, puzzles are being planned and greyboxed – everything is starting to come together! Though several members of our team had hurdles this week, including illnesses, swim meets, and religious retreats, it feels like we’re finally getting into a rhythm that we can use to keep this project going through to the finish line.
Better teleportation and custom hand shaders are in the prototype scene.
A second puzzle has been greyboxed thanks to Samara.
Sydney worked on concept art for the wall on which said puzzle takes place.
Models for the bio wall and for the general room were drafted.
On this week’s docket:
Using our usual classtime to meet and improve the puzzle progression flowchart developed this week.
Last call for character concept art!
Drafting another conversation.
Getting our first sound files and implementing them!
Refining puzzles in and debugging the prototype scene.
Finishing putting all of our planned tasks into our Gantt chart.
It’s been an EXTREMELY hectic week here at Prediction Error. We’ve been prototyping like mad scientists, pulling together a work-in-progress scene that has most of the key components of our design and prototyping work so far.
This means we have a playable build with a conversation, (very) alpha teleportation, a simple (until it gets art) puzzle, and a murder board that works!
The murder board is particularly exciting, as it’s a key part of our game that required the collaboration of three individuals and relies on several challenging scripts to function. However, it’s in great shape, and we’re happy to have seen it come together so fast! Players can select photos (from a lovely sample set featuring Aziz Ansari, Ryan Gosling, and a painting of a monk, among other things), place them on the board, rearrange them, despawn the board, and pull it back up at any time during gameplay.
We also have the beginnings of a line-drawing connection mechanism for the murder board, as created by Chris.
The art team is still hard at work working on concepting and greyboxing, including a full-size room floorplan created by Sydney and new concept art from Dan,
The sound team has begun creating the basis for their compositions, and we look forward to having audio to work with in the coming weeks!
It’s Week 6 and we’ve got a build and lots to show for our five weeks of hard work.
But there’s still plenty to do. We ran into some hiccups with creting the prototype, and code crashed into itself, shaders became incompatible with the render pipeline, and technology sometimes just hated us.
This week, we’re looking forward to addressing some of these bugs, finalizing all of our concepts, and setting ourselves up to get started creating!
