Week 6: Marching Ahead!

~ This week’s blog post written by guest writer Ramya! Thanks, Ramya! ~

Uff! Week 6 was intense. If Week 5 could be compared to pulling the catapult string back, Week 6 is definitely the launch of the projectile forward!

Client business first. During the client call this week, our client representative LJ emphasised tying the mobile application (i.e the playbook collection game) that we are building with the inter-inning event. He also pointed us to take a look at Kiips, a mobile app used to provide rewards to users. Finally, we were also asked not to tailor the inter-inning event specifically to Altoona curve. Our app already is generic and does not use any specific team logos in the UI.

As follow-ups from quarters, we met with Chris Klug, Tom Corbett, Dave and Drew. Each of them had valuable suggestions moving forward and lots of insights to offer. Across the board, all of them drove us to establish a even more precise demographic and get in touch with Altoona Curve as quickly as possible. Verizon has no preference for a target demographic, so we are reaching out to various minor-league teams to determine which audience segments they are most interested in engaging..

Tom advised to explore how we could invoke a sense of nostalgia through the experience we create and advised us to explore in that direction. Dave suggested that we think about how our experience explains the connection between the audience and the event and felt that a ‘moment to moment’ type of interaction probably works better. Chris Klug raised the critical question of what would convince a typical baseball fan to use our app rather than enjoying a beer and staying on social network. Drew and the team had a fun meeting about how the aggregate score of the section from the mobile game could decide the fireworks display at the end of the match.

We are actively working on nailing down the inter-inning activity, with Brynn spearheading the brainstorm. This is happening in parallel to the development of the mobile application and hence ensuring all of us are kept busy. There is an an excellent pipeline flow of work within the team.

Our playbook collection game got deeper with an added functionality of the player being able to predict the play and then be rewarded if the prediction comes true. On the tech front, we moved from developing in Java and Android studio to using a 2D game engine called COCOS 2dx after weighing the pros and cons of different platforms. Yong has past experience with the engine and is helping Zoe and me cross the initial knowledge barrier as quickly as possible. Even within a week, collectively between the three of us, we have built a home screen with login, navigation toolbars, prediction scene and section selection and scoring scenes. The aim for next week is to fine tune all of them and integrate to have a perfectly working prototype. But yes, we would not know if the prototype is working or not if we don’t playtest. Since the coming week is GDC, we potentially lose out on playtesters within the ETC. Therefore, we plan to playtest early the following week.