This week, well, actually, last week, has been all about putting our weekly plan into action.

Important people , important milestone

One of the things we had to do, was to send Umami to some important people to reach an important milestone in our project. After making sure everything in that package was as it should be, it was sent. This also involved updating the earliest revision of the design document to make it current. Quite fun and a trip down memory lane.

Story panels

We’ve also started on getting a story panel system in place. It is now ready, but needs to get some real content to see it in action. The story panels will help tell the story of Umami as players move through from level to level.

Music, track list almost confirmed complete

Another challenge this week was to get the final track list ready. This is one of those things that ideally should have been in place aaages ago, but it’s not your first real game unless you have slightly bumpy road; That’s how you learn to become better! The track list now seems ready. It’s not 100% confirmed, but 95-99% . We can’t wait to finally announce the full track list. We hope to be able to do that next week.

New graphical assets

Graphics has been drawn, and here it’s for levels which has not yet been shown in video. The graphical stuff has been for the forest theme and the western theme.  Having a bit of different assets to place around the levels makes them come alive.  It’ll be great to see how the new assets blends in to the graphical updating that will be done on those levels.

Forest asset

western asset

Level making

A very important part of the completion of our game, is of course the levels. We’ve begun the early level making process of mapping out notes for our seventh level. It’ll be one of the most challenging levels in the game, with quite complex and speedy patterns. On friday the whole team did a playtest of the patterns, and found them very challenging, but precise, which is a good basis for the rest of the level.

Game testing at the library

And finally, this week was topped of with our first play test with children in the age 10-13 . This was very useful for us and helped a lot to make us identify difficulty curve, good points and elements that needs more work. The playtesting happened at library in Hamar, where they had a game night inviting children and youth to come and spend the night with games, competitions and socializing.

This was actually a very brilliant spot to test the game, because it had to compete with other areas of interest. The children could choose between Umami, and many other activities. We found that those who sat down for a while to try and master the game, became quite involved, and others gave up and went to do something else after just some minutes of play.

This gave us a good insight and we’ve noted down areas for improvement. Thank you Library of Hedmark/Hamar for the opertunity!

And that is all from this weeks tumbleweek!