Mentor Review #2: Christian

This mentor review was supposed to be me presenting my finalized game to my mentor, Christian. Since I did not end up completing my game fully, I just started with a heart-to-heart about where I currently stand and how much more I had to do during the time we had met. I talked with him about what he suggested last time about making sure the tutorial had pop-ups and interactable UI so the user can understand more of what they are doing and showed him the tutorial and UI pop-ups that are included in the ? mark buttons. He said that it looked much better and thinks that it will provide the user with enough information on how I am presenting the main feedback loop of the game We went through the main feedback loop and I asked him to look for things to improve first. At this point, I had almost made the UI match perfectly to the UI I had created for Adobe XD; which had gone through a series of tests with the users already so I wanted to work with that information. The first thing he noticed was that in practice, the "Goals" and the "List" tabs each had very similar functionality, almost too similar. He suggested that I either change the purpose of having both or simplify the main feedback loop by continuing to keep most of the profile on the main page of my game. I wanted to originally have both because I was planning on making more nested menus pop-up when you tap the fish located in the fish list or profile. However, Christian seemed to see it as a visual opportunity for an easy place to keep your entire list of goals and didn't understand why I needed two visual lists of the fish. I saw it as more of an opportunity to provide a jumping place for different fish profiles. In reality, Christian said it looked way better just keeping all the fish information on the pop-up profile you see when you click the fish on the main tank page. And I had also realized that creating menus to take the user away from the main fish tank is very counterintuitive since I want them to interact with the fish on the main screen. I then had him go through the game again and I asked about anything else he saw future issues with. He asked me to verbally explain to him what exactly I had to do left. I started to run through a few small things I thought was the only thing I had left to do, specifically it had to do with adding the Achievement properties and what exactly those will be. He asked me about the store functionality and what I wanted that to look like in the future. I realized that I had a bit of work to do within the Store code as well, with one of the main things being how the items will interact when the user buys them. I also realized at one point, all these variables and data points need to be stored in a JSON for the Save + Load functionality. I also realized just the sheer amount of art I will need to do within the next week. After that half of the conversation, he noticed that many of things I had forgotten about / assumed were done to the extent I thought were piling up and I perhaps needed to focus on simplifying and making sure the user understands as much as possible Overall, I think Christian helped me the most this week by: - Providing me with the opportunity to break down my project into different coding pieces and talk about what piece does what and how it could be improved. - Specifically the Achievements, Store, Goals, List, and the main feedback loop. - Helped me to condense my menus. - Helping with any code or GitHub issues as I was working (there were a few minor issues like me accidentally merging the branch on the wrong account.) - Providing an outside POV and in-person feedback as soon as I showed him something which was extra helpful because I need feedback but never get it in time.