When making a project that has both physical and digital components, it’s important to have prototypes for both aspects. To this end, I plan on making a roughly functional version of the movement system for the first week, along with, hopefully, the turn manager and a base AI. This means that the actual combat portion would remain, along with creating several piece types in order to flesh the game out more. I’m unsure if I can have the actual base combat done in time for the first prototype, so I’ll keep working on the actual damage and numbers parts while working on the other aspects of the prototype. I would be looking for feedback as to whether or not the movement system seems to work in a logical manner, and if the enemy AI seems too dumb, and maybe suggestions based on that. 

For the second prototype, I believe it would be prudent to showcase the unit designs, both physically and digitally, in order to get feedback on how clear the differences were. Unfortunately, I won’t have the materials to make every single thing out of different colored wood and acrylic, but I can at least get the models properly textured in order to convey the difference. I hope to get feedback on how easy it is to distinguish between factions and unit types, as well as which side they would prefer to be controlled by players. It would be better to find out that it’s hard to differentiate between the units and factions early on, when I still have ample time to change them. 

For the final prototype phase, I will likely be showing off UI elements. While I would ideally show off the arduino functionality at this point in time, I’m very new to working with arduino, and I doubt that it would be finished in time. U.I. is an incredibly important part of strategy RPG’s, and I would like my menus and such to be clear, readable, and nice looking, but I admit that I don’t really have the eye for this. I will draw up a handful of designs, most of which will likely be pretty basic, and then expand on the two I like the most and present them as the prototypes. I want feedback on how clear they are, the general size of them, and just overall design issues that people may have with them.  

Throughout the whole process I will be working on the combat system to go along with the unit designs and the turn manager. The idea is to get at least a basic version of this finished in time for the Fall Show, and hopefully have a small amount of arduino functionality. This will hopefully be the skeleton for the final product, so I expect it to be bare-bones, but I certainly plan on trying to flesh it out as much as possible.