SIP Blog: Making it happen – 6/30/23
Making it Happen
By Jack McEvoy, WPI ‘24
We are now approximately halfway through our time in the Summer Innovation Program, and every team is working hard to flesh out their games. Playtesters either visiting the office or open-house events have provided us with plenty of helpful feedback, so we’re adjusting course, making edits, and planning new features. Overall, it seems like everyone is making incredible progress. While they might not be on the level of published games yet, each of the teams here has a solid idea and plenty of skill to pull it off, even if they’ve had some extreme setbacks.
As for my team, Cotton Candy, we are doing exceptionally well on the content we’re aiming to include in the final game. Out of the planned 5 levels of our rhythm game, we have completed 3 levels-worth of art content, and 2 of those are fully playable. Our art team is incredibly skilled and adept at teamwork, and creates an immense amount of high quality art in a short amount of time. At our current pace, we might even have the resources to make another level or add one or two of our other stretch goals. Our ideas for potential future features include outfits, online leaderboards, and even the ability to play as prior opponents. Of course, over-scoping and inevitable bugs are on everyone’s minds, so our expectations are thoroughly tempered.
Speaking of bugs, a significant amount of our programmers’ effort over the past week has been spent adjusting, testing, and overhauling the core systems of our game. Supposedly a rhythm game has yet to be done during SIP due to their challenges when it comes to programming and making enough music. While we’re certainly encountering those challenges, we’ve also found solutions, and we believe our game has reached a stable state, programming-wise. Additionally, our Sound Designer has made plenty of high quality music while also working with the other 3 teams, which is seriously impressive. Overall, we’re well on our way to a full-featured, shippable game, and we’re getting closer every day.
