After the playtest day, we had a long meeting about what should we change about our experience.
As we mentioned in last week’s news letter, our playtesters are not willing to clip through the table to reach the other side. And we think this is a waste of the whole space. After our discussion, we decided to try different locations of the lot, which are lot on the ground and lot floating in the space. We made quickly prototype both ideas and we found that
1. The lot on the ground is too far away. Objects looks too small on the ground and it’s very hard to bend in virtual space.
2. The lot floating in the air feels very good. People are willing to walkaround the lot and construct walls or locating objects from different angles.
Because we took away the table in our experience, we need to find another place to have those button UIs. In addition, as we mentioned last week, we found players didn’t want to turn around the space and open the drawers. Instead, they will only focus on the buttons and wall building tool in front of them. Therefore, we changed the drawers to a floating toolbox which players can summon to wherever they are in the space. In this way, we believe it is easy for players to navigate objects without a lot of physical-turning-around. And the buttons on tool box are easier to reach. We also found that even the tool box is much smaller than the drawer located on the ground, because of the distance, players can easily see all the objects clearly and identify what they are looking for.
Except for these environmental changes, we made small tweaks on appearance and added some easy to use functions.
1. We changed the large UI which indicates what mode players are in to a small mode. In this way, the model won’t be obstruction when players want to use the tip of the plumbob.
2. We added the function that allows players to put objects onto table objects so that players can better decorate their rooms.
3. As we observed in the playtest, players really wanted the function of deleting rooms or making hallways between rooms. Therefore, we implemented wall deletion and room deletion this week.
4. As requested by our instructors, we changed the drawer pop out animation to drawer pulling out, which means the drawer movement will follow the controller and players need to drag out the drawers by themselves instead of trigger the drawer open/close animation.
Other than the iterations, we had our first prototype of 2D palette interface.
We playtested the 2D palette and tool box. It turned out that people all have different preferences.
2D palette by far is very fast and easy to navigate. And using the same technique of putting objects on the lot still works well and intuitive. However, there is still problem with the in-room mode. We are not sure what will be the best way to generate the new object in the room.
In addition, this is just our first prototype. We found although the vertical layout and rectangle interface works fine, aesthetically it looks not integrated into the environment. And for left hand dominate people, it is hard to navigate between rooms.
We are working on another design of the 2D palette which is a more round. We will test this circle based interface next week. Besides, we are going to try another idea which came up at the end of this week. We think it would be another cool idea to navigate object by scrolling a tray and will implement it next week.