This week was very unusual for me in terms of what my work entailed (or it felt that way anyway). Off the bat, my job was to contact two different people, one a student here who is specializing in sound design (a bit of a rarity for us) and another a professional musician whose song we wanted to get a licence to use. Beyond that, because the capstone production time is down to approximately 2 full weeks with some change, I was asked to also begin pulling audio from any license free sources I could get my hands on. I'm no audio guru but the team needed all the content options it could get to spice up our experience.
I ended up spending the majority of my time on a single audio effects site and scrolling/listing to hundreds of pages of sounds. The majority of course weren't usable for us but I did manage to find a few that I think will work nicely in a pinch. Even though the student we contracted was hired to do sound effects for our vertical slice, I focused on many of the same sounds in case he wasn't able to complete his work or simply for more options. Who knows, they may still be used in the final game for other parts of the experience.
Beyond sound, it felt like a very fast, quiet week for the team. I think that's because the majority of the work was done either early (at the beginning of the sprint) or toward the end (which is pretty common with other homework and classes taking up precious hours of the week). Because of this, I wasn't feeling super confident about our game. I know that's bad as the producer, but I simply wasn't sure the team was really working to pull off the changes we need to make to succeed.
Flash-forward to today and QA with the latest build. Boy is it buggy but peoples first response when playing it was smiles, some laughter, and a small group of people simply watching. Beyond much better QA results, that was what I really wanted to see - engagement with the build. Now that I've seen that, as well as playing it myself, I'm much happier with the results of this weeks work. I'm confident that this team will pull this off and be a strong candidate to move forward into production with. Next up, we just need to fix a lot of small bugs and quality of life upgrades, adapt the AI a bit more, get the menus to all function together (scenes in Unity primarily), and last but not least - a guns update to balance and tweak them so they feel more different. One full week to go for the majority of that. I know it's a lot but this is definitely hope I feel for the project and team.