Week Two- Cracking on

Time for another weekly update! Something I didn't realise fully until I embarked upon this project that time goes by really quickly when you're developing, it's so enjoyable and I speak for everyone when I say that this is so rewarding and fun!

Feedback and play testing

Getting feedback from other people has been really important to us so far, as I mentioned in my last post, we managed to get a pre-alpha version of Ascend at our graduate show and we managed to get a lot of player feedback. I gathered information in two ways, firstly by strictly only observing someone play the game and take note of what they seem to be most interested in, for example some players just wandered around slowly looking around the environment whereas others seem to go much quicker and tried to go into out of bound areas. After the players were finished playing, I asked them for opinions and critiques and it was interesting to hear feedback from players of a variety of ages, but everyone seemed to agree that they understood what they were meant to do and how to progress.

Based on areas which players seemed to struggle, Adam edited our level to add clarity to busier areas and we essentially fine tuned out what we thought were issues from watching other people play our game.

Environment

We've made a good start on blocking in key environment pieces, with Declan, Andrew and myself (Eleanor) focusing on the most important aspects which are the key pieces during gameplay and in the environment you interact with. Andrew, as our Unreal wizard, has been setting up systems in Unreal to 

Here are some early WIP shots to show some progression of our environment coming along:

 

Character art- The Warden 

Jord, our character artist, has been hard at work for the past two weeks getting Ascend's protagonist, The Warden game ready for Adam to start animating. Here are some sneak previews of our stoic champion in the making:

Other exciting news and a sneak peak 

In other news, we've started speaking to our sound wizard who will be producing our game's soundtrack; Joel Anthony (www.soundcloud.com/bluexiii). He will be coming to visit us here at Final Forge HQ in the upcoming week, and we're really excited to start collaborating on this project. 

Declan is also working on an amazing addition to our games story- an opening animation. I am so genuinely excited to see this progress, and I don't want to give too much away with it being an earlier draft, so here's a GIF to show you some of the kind of stuff he's going to be producing:

 

Next week we're going to an event called Talk Tranzfuser to meet all the other teams and hear success stories from previously funded teams. I'm looking forward to meeting everyone and I've had fun following other teams progress on social media, and of course it's another chance for us to get feedback from people outside of our team, so we're going to present to the highest quality we can and hopefully get some helpful advice.