This past Thursday was the EAE open house, and things went really well.
The team had two 55" TVs that we displayed live gameplay team members playing the game. Occasionally, somebody else would have a go with one of the team members which frequently resulted in a really tense play session while the crowd looked on. It's great to see how much fun other people besides the debs have when they play our game. Admittedly, it was about as warm a crowd as you could get, but people still had a lot of fun.
About 30 minutes into the night, disaster struck. For some reason, one-by-one, stations began dropping out and became to one another over the network. We had never really stress tested the server, but 14 stations seemed perfectly reasonable, so we had totally not anticipated this problem. Fortunately, Max was there. He grabbed a laptop, built another solution and worked with the other engineers to install that new solution on the machines while Zac and I gave explanations while pointing at the YouTube videos.
Although it seemed like hours that the game was down, it probably wasn't much more than 30 minutes. Max is a wizard, and our whole team is awesome for keeping their cool and jumping into action to fix the problem. I'm still not totally sure exactly what happened, but hopefully the break will give us time to diagnose what the problem was so we can avoid it for release. I'm strongly suspicious that Max knows what the problem is.
We got a lot of fantastic feedback, and we're blessed to rub shoulders with some very smart people. Jeff from EA Allplay was there to talk in detail about things that we can do to improve the interface and understanding of the player for hacker gameplay. He pointed out that we were fighting for the hackers attention--instead of having a power bar that we want to have the hacker continuously look at, he challenged us to get rid of the bar all together. There's something that we can do to show the information we're trying to get across without requiring a power bar, and whatever that is can be done in the area that the hacker is already looking. I suspect the same goes for the thief, too. We finally have some time to breathe this break before we go into the long haul that will be next semester.
Speaking of winter break, there's a lot ahead in the next few weeks. Chris has been working on a level-builder solution, which is sadly taking more time than we had anticipated. Hopefully, he'll get it working so that we can not only crank out levels faster than ever before, but also crank out levels with interesting shapes, (not rectangle!) As well.
Personally, I've made it a goal to actually implement 20 levels into the game by the end of the break. I know that I'm capable of more, but it want to make sure that the levels actually get in to the game, and not have a handful of half-finished, buggy levels to show for my efforts.
Speaking of half-finished levels, Damean took the levels that we had been working with and really made them shine for the open house. I didn't consider the levels that we were working with to be half-finished, but the difference between levels that Damean worked on and levels that he didn't was like night and day. I have to remember to get him a better copy of the hacker map with the OS switches written on the hacker guide plane, that would really help him.
I'm currently flying back from Illinois after visiting my family for the winter break, and I'm feeling extra revitalized to work on both Cyber Heist and finish up the Oppy project. I wrote this entire entry on a new iPad I got to help with the cross-platform aspect of Cyber Heist, and I'm really excited for the next few upcoming months.
