This week the team brainstormed and had a design pitch to client on Wednesday. Meanwhile we finalized Logo design and short description. 

Design Process

We started brainstorming near the end of last week. The whole team sit down together and just throw ideas out. We quickly had three ideas that we were all excited about and planned to show them to client this week. The question is, are those three ideas our best ideas? Or they just happen to be the three most obvious ones that came up to our mind. Faculty suggested that we might want to slow down and revisit the design process so we really pushed the boundaries of imagination and creativity.

Faculty also pointed out some brainstorming techniques to the team. We revisited our design progress and come up with categories including game themes, length, iconic moments in The Sims, Sims types of players. Then we fill the categories with keywords. Take types of Sims players as example. We found online that there are eleven types of players including role-player and challenger. Using the mix and match technique, we asked ourselves, what if we were to design a cooking-themed five-minute game for teenage role-play types of player. From there we came up with around 20 ideas and shortlisted those to 6 to present. 

Idea 1

The first idea we have is very related to The Sims. Players will be dealing with random daily events such as doing chores, making food, while making critical life-changing decisions at certain points in the experience. When the player reaches the end of a storyline and decides to start a new game, the previous Sim will reprise in some form in the next run.

An example scenario:
You create a Sim who aims to become a master chef. As every Sim does, he becomes hungry over time. This “regular” event is only invoked and given to the player whenever the player asks Alexa to check on his/her Sim. In this scenario, our example player tells our Sim to make food. Through this activity he trains his culinary skills.

Idea 2:

We found that a good amount of people use Alexa as a tool comparing to a competitive game console. As we mentioned Volley FM, it gives the guest different recommendations of subscriptions each day. And another app called Healing Sounds just provides sounds for the guest to constantly play as the background, such as healing sounds, lullaby, or random raining sounds. And it easily got 4.9 stars out of 5 by 3000+ reviewers. In this experience, we are trying to design and create an experience that simulates the environments while the player slowly building and managing stuffs, it constantly generating relaxed atmosphere. 

Imagine you are sitting in a coffee shop. You own this coffee shop and It was you who developed this coffee shop from a small food truck to a busy one. Your manager isn’t annoying, he only ask you to make important decisions a few times a week. Last week you decided to turn your coffee shop from a small but high_ended space into a huge affordable place because you are tired of listening to spirit music and you want some rock-n-roll. This week you can hear that college students are stepping in, they are having fun, making jokes and working on their stuffs. But! You are just a dying programmer who has to hand-in the works tomorrow and it’s 3am in the morning.    

Idea 3

Environments are important in building immersive game experiences. Leveraging Alexa’s ability in controlling lights and other devices will allow us to build a responsive environments to better serve the experience.

Imagine if it is horror games, as you start, Alexa turns off all your lights and you start your experience. You are walking into a cave and the way you tell your distance to the ghost by the light intensity. When you are in danger, all the lights turned into dim red and starts to flash irregularly. After you walked away from the ghost, the light goes back to stable again. 

By controlling the physical environment that players are in using Alexa, we are able to: 

  • Build immersive environment
  • Deliver information to interact with players 

Other Ideas

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