BGP Week 5: Alpha

One of the major events this week was the alpha testing session. This was probably one of the most important events that occurred during the last few weeks, since we received some really valuable feedback from two members of the industry.  We were told that the most interesting part of the game was the story, which does not come through in the demo we are making. They suggested that we should try to get at least a little bit of it in there. They also told us that our scope for GGC (Gotland Game Conference) might be a bit big, and we should focus on polishing the bits we have got so far, instead of implementing more things. This means, that we would focus on getting combat with normal enemy units to be fun and challenging, and scrap the boss entirely. Ultimately, a bunch of assets facing the bin.

The alpha aside, I have spent part of the week making the GUI, more accurately; writing in Arabic for the first time in my life. When the player enters her “powered up” mode, a sign with Arabic text will appear on the screen. Being the group’s primary 2D artist, i took the task to draw it. The funny part is that I really did not know what I was writing, I knew one of the words are “Harakat”, meaning something in the likes of “waving arms around fancily”, and the other word meant “magically”. Our producer who can write in Arabic, showed me what the text would look like, and I simply drew the letters in a fancy way, taking inspiration from pictures of Arabic calligraphy. When stylizing the text, I accidentally got one of the letters wrong at first, resulting in  the sign saying something close to “Magical highway” instead of “Magically waving hands around fancily”.

Now, you might wonder, what would make the Arabs need a word for “waving your arms around fancily”? Honestly, I have no idea, perhaps I will ask the producer, and mention it in my next post.