PROGRAMMING

Programming wise, work has been put in on making code more modular and populating scenes from the database as intended. For the moment, we’re currently a bit behind schedule as we’ve been intending to make more scenes such as moving in the overworld also integrated from the database. However, we’re keeping focus on the evaluation scenes so we can demo them on 4/3.

Within the Evaluation scene, we’ve been working on developer tools as well as the results screen.

We’ve added mouseover text so hovering over a piece of Chinese text gives you the PinYin (pronunciation) for the Chinese dialogue. This is helpful for both players and developers. For developers, since there is no guarantee that people on this team or future development teams know Chinese, having PinYin, and in the near future English, helps developers know what’s going on in-game. For Players, since the game intends to teach social scenarios as opposed to language, having a PinYin option would make the game more forgiving and not test for the wrong concepts.

ART

We came up with a sketch of the overworld environment. In this environment, the player can interact in four social scenarios: fruit vendor, department store, bank, and street (all at the left of the picture). The homebase (restaurant) is located on the right part of the picture. The player starts from the restaurant scenario (practicing with the buddybot) and rotates from practicing with buddybot in the restaurant to interacting with build-in characters in real-life social scenarios.

In terms of build-in characters, we have completed five different expressions of the fruit vendor (award, confused, happy, mad, neutral).

PRODUCTION SCHEDULE

    For production, we have adjusted our goal to completing 3 social scenarios (bank, department store, street) by the end of the semester. For the coming week (by 4/6), we are aiming to have a polished version of the fruit vendor scenario, including multiple-choice practice with buddy bot, multiple-choice challenge with the vendor, and drag-and-drop challenges.

The programming challenges include adding rewards system and tracking player data. Having finished the sketch of the environment, the next steps will be creating UI, refining the environment, and creating buddy bot.