Production

Over the past few weeks we’ve made a first level to act as a tutorial level and conducted a couple of very informative playtests. We’ve also accomplished a lot in terms of creating products, writing social media “dialogue” for the characters, trying to portray believable, humorous, and unique voices that can simultaneously convey what they might consider purchasing. Here’s a table we are currently filling in to keep track of all the products we are going to have —I’ll be trying to make a table for characters too once we have a lot so we can keep track of that as well.

But as you can see here I made a couple of drawings for the products which I’m relatively happy about how it was received since during playtests, players would mostly just look at the images and the product names instead of reading the information below. The art style is sort of inconsistent as you can see but I don't think non artists notice, it just bothers me a little bit so I may be tweaking it a little bit. But overall, I’m glad the players got the general gist of what each product is for just from looking at it. Some of the products need to be more obvious (I’m really just dragging my drawing for Queese right now). Also, I learned that I may have figure out a way to convey the side effects of the products with images rather than just words. Some of the ideas I thought of just now were

• A red stamp that says the product is not FDA approved or something adjacent
• A sticky note with red lettering sticking out the side of the file, tucked away that says there were complaints

I think using red ink or any red visual might be an easy, cop-out way of drawing the player’s attention to one thing apart from the rest of the text that might be there (in case they are interested in reading) and it’s a good way of visualizing alarm bells -a literal red flag maybe. 

There was a lot that was accomplished and I’m proud of how much it seems that we’ve progressed since the last dev log but as you can see, there’s still a lot to work on. All of the player feedback would be dependent on animations that I make so I have to start working on that promptly! But once that is done, we have a surprisingly solid base. 

Also I still don’t know if he reads these so I’m kinda just gonna use this as a reminder of things I need to work on. 

• Like button (and views, retweets, etc. but they are secondary)  -it will work for players to both seem like they are giving a post traction to support a product as well as a tracker for which posts they think might give hints for what product they want to push to them
• Transition animations
• Profile pics