Testing can be fun!

The first week back from the Christmas break is finally over, and what a great week it has been. Prototyping and listening to guest speakers was pretty much all that happened this week. Jono, Josh and I worked on trying to prototype a cooperative AI system that the team could use for the game. Definitely not easy. We focused mainly on an algorithm known as "Windowed Hierarchical Cooperative A*" presented by David Silver. Although alot of work was done, in terms of protoyping, there is still alot more documentation that we still need to do. I will be documenting the 3D graph implementation that we made for the algorithm.

Other than that, today and yesterday was spent listening to Gareth from Sidhe, Usability Expert Extraordinaire. He gave the team some great insight into how playtesting can be run. I naively thought that each play testing session would take at most 15mins to run which does not seem to be the case. The teams goal of producing a highly polished, and hopefully recognised game means that time needs to be invested into this part of the production. It is good to know before we begin playtesting how to properly run each session because it allows us to schedule for it.

On a side note, thanks to James and Gareth, and also Sidhe Interactive for their help this week! Any programmers interested in checking out David Silver's paper on Cooperative A*, try here. Keep tuned for updates....