Programming

We have scaffolded all of our different scenes; We have multiple choice scene which Brian has been iterating on and improving, a drag and drop construct your own sentence that Ryan improved on to catch partial correctness such as Sociopragmatic or grammatical errors, which will help give more constructive feedback to players and reduce frustration. Additionally, we have constructed an over-world scene, which the player can navigate using directional keys or WASD, as well as interact with people and strike up conversation.

We’ve also ran into a number of setbacks. One in particular was that upon presenting our checkpoint progress report, a guest industry specialist pointed out that our interactions differ from practice to challenge mode. Before the protagonist of our story set out into the real world, they have an opportunity to practice their Chinese with a buddy bot, providing a stakes free learning environment. The original plan was to have a fun interaction during practice mode like throwing that would help spice up the dull action of selecting multiple choice and help engage  people starting up this game, and remove it later in the game where situational context is more important. However, concerns were raised as to establishing misleading “rules” for the player and giving them false expectations.

As to where we’re going for here, addressing the concern raised above. However, the big focus moving forward will be constructing our database and game manager so that we can start populating our database and resource folders and really streamlining the process of creating scenarios and story before we start making them.

Art

As said last week, we’ve established a more focused and concrete aesthetic of solarpunk rather than cyberpunk. We’ve brought a stronger focus on the Chinese aspects of the environment. We finalized the visual layouts of the game, with the four key views being the Practice View, Challenge View, Conversation View, and Overworld View. Reactions and feedback given by the NPCs who are being questions will involve large talksprites sliding into view with the proper expression for a reaction, to emphasize the feedback being given to the player.

Going forward we will be creating polished art assets that can be used for the upcoming playtestable scenario.

Key Game Views:

MOVING FORWARD

This week we will focus on finalizing the prototype so we can move to full production in March. We need to come up with a new idea for the fun interaction during the practice phase. We need to set up “rules” so that the player will experience the same rules through different social scenarios (instead of throwing apples). We also need to build a playable sample of the game so we can start playtesting. By the end of March, we will complete four social scenarios (street, bank, department, fruit vendor) with both practice and challenges phases.

Meanwhile, Xiaofei will communicate with her dissertation committee members about the game plan to make sure that she can use the game for her research study. The goal is to minimize the variables on the interaction and learning experiences in the game and the web-based comparison environment.

Production schedule for March