Product
This week was all about preparing for the Alpha demo:
- I worked on implementing some work by the other members of the team for our demonstration
- We presented on Thursday
Process
Implementation
The majority of my focus this week was spent on preparing our demo into a decent state for the Alpha Presentation.
It was important that work from the other team members was included in our demo. I implemented several calls to Kieran's SoundManager as it was necessary to demonstrate some basic early version of user feedback, namely plugging in/out switches and a line where GUS explains what the ABCs do. For the next release, I plan on working with Kieran to fully implement the rest of his sounds.
I used Paddy's AnimationManager to trigger a GUS speech animation when the voice line started and stopped this when the line ended, this gives the appearance of GUS talking and demonstrates a basic version of the animations we intend to have for our final release.
I implemented some of Charlie's new cable models which are able to be plugged in/out of the ABC.
I also carried out some minor testing, made changes and fixes to multiple scripts to allow a smooth run through of existing functionality.
Presentation
The presentation gave us a good image of what we needed to work on. From a technical perspective, the presentation went well and the technical demo fulfilled it's purpose perfectly. Feedback was received on the sound/user feedback/gameplay aspects, as these weren't all there in this demo; this was something that we expected as the bulk of these features are yet to be implemented.
From a presenting perspective, it didn't go well at all. Cormac had written a script which some of us, including myself (as I was working on the demo) hadn't learned very well, and we ended up reading the scripts from our phones.
This proved to not be very engaging and the audio on the demonstration video that we played was far too quiet, all in all resulting in a poor performance.
We realised from this that for our next presentation, we really need to have everything down to a tee, by having the room, audio, video, and script prepared well in advance.