Senior Production Blog 11 (4/7/2017)

With the completion of the story last week, this week was fairly light. I made some edits to various parts of the story based on team/peer/and professor feedback, but the team also asked me to come up with various sketches for improving the level select screen once more.

We have 3 game modes, and 10 levels. Each level has all three game modes, one for training, which introduces you to the kanji, one for a challenge, which challenges your training, and one for battle which is the final test of your training. Each of these previously has been selected by selector arrows and is slightly clunky. I created 5 variants for how changes could be made. Each one is slight variations based on different ways we've talked about how player interactions could be improved. 

Our artist, Maddie took these variations and improved them to what will possibly be our final iteration of the mode select screen:

You click on the mode you want to choose, it contains images of the kanji used within, and then you click the begin button. I personally am pushing for a double tap system, as having extra buttons on a touch interface is clunky and cluttered, but I am receiving push back from the team on this front. These reasons include "it's fucking annoying", and that the space where the begin button is would have to be replaced with another art asset that we don't have time to create. These are somewhat vaild concerns, but just about every mobile game I have on my phone uses single or double tap systems without confirm buttons just fine, so this will be something I address with the team in our upcoming meetings.

This Saturday, we are meeting up to have a work meeting, and I'll make the final touches on the tutorial, after a "will we/won't we" debate on removing the undo button, and write tutorial sections for our other two aspects of our game: Kanji Drop, our flashcard like mini game, and the Kanji Guide, a book with every kanji you've learned so far with the ability to pick any number of kanji to practice. As we head into the final stretches, it's a lot of polish and making sure players have a perfectly smooth experience.