Week 10: Final Demo

Enhancing, polishing and finalizing

Moving on to the last week of development, it’s time to wrap things up and prepare for the final showcase. At this point, we’ve achieved almost every objective we’ve set out to accomplish. Given the available time, we made several final enhancements to the game.

• We built a background story for the game by adding story cutscenes to each level and an end game cutscene after the player completes the game. Each of the story cutscenes is meticulously hand-drawn by Felicia and they serve to provide context and immersion to the player experience rather than just having disjointed levels to play through. 
• We also made some UI enhancements like fade in/out effects between scenes to make the transition less jarring or abrupt.
• The music students put in a phenomenal effort to provide new sound effects or background music for the new content.

For polishing, extensive playtesting is done to catch any left-over bugs before the final product is released. New levels created from the previous week are tested for play length and difficulty. In this process, we noticed level inconsistencies like untimely tutorial message placement and the unintuitive first level design addressed by previous judges where the player needs to backtrack from the goal to reach the level. We addressed these issues by spreading out message display timing and finally redesigning the first level so that the player does not need to backtrack anymore. With everything prepared and set in stone, we finalized what we had by making the trailer for the game and reporting on weekly progress since the start.