Senior Production Blog 3 (2/3/2017)

This week, the team challenged through Greenlight, meaning a lot of documentation had to be done, addressing various requested changes. While I had done the main element I had been assigned last week (reforming the tutorial), Glynis was working on finishing up the Game Design Document, fully committing to changes making the game more "game like", adding scores, ranking, and bonuses. The Design Document, presented in powerpoint format, was pictureless, so my job this week was to take the Design Document and give it a graphical treatment. 

The VDD fully encapsulates what is in the powerpoint Design Document: the 3 different modes, the scoring system, stroke order, ranking players kanji, and the bonuses they get in various modes.

The scoring system seems interesting: it assigns each node a value of 5 points, and each node you get wrong subtracts 5 points. This then factors into your rank, and if you make mistakes, you lose out on bonuses. However, you can still get everything right, and not get all bonuses. Stroke order, while important in actually writing the Kanji is kind of boring and overly complicated for a video game adaptation of a language. Thus, stroke order is now relegated to a bonus feature. It also means that a player can literally be perfect at our game. By getting the kanji right, using no undos, in proper stroke order, the player can perfectly draw each kanji. In order to keep scores competetive, a time bonus is added, so unless players are drawing all the kanji in less than a second, each players score will be slightly different, meaning that the player has room for improvement, and encouragement to keep playing. After creating the VDD, we had a brief meeting, blocking out who is going to talk where during the greenlight presentation, and that's what we've got done so far. We have a meeting coming up tomorrow blocking out the next two weeks of work for everybody, so I'm excited to see what comes next.