This week our team is focusing on iterating the existing product. Our development phase has ended. Now we need to polish the product. There are several areas we need to improve on. More sound effects Adding visual guidance to Alexa Find a better way to present our product. During soft opening at Pittsburgh side, most faculty only had the chance to play through act 1 but the experience consists of 5 acts with puzzles. We...
Read moreWe had 7 guests coming in this Wednesday to playtest our experience. We ask playtesters to choose from one of the five acts. We also ask them to fill out a survey afterwards. Major takeaway from this playtests include: We should use more question style ending to prompt the user to answer If a user is stuck at one point, instead of repeating the same reprompt message, we should give them more help or hints....
Read moreThis week the team finished the development phase of our product: the sound is in, the full storyline is in, puzzles are in. Here is a complete description of our project. Act 1 Tutorial + Story You are a thirsty traveler who has just arrived at a mysterious desert town. Strangely, the town has an unbearable stench. Before you find out what’s going on, you need to get some water first. You will meet a general...
Read moreThis week, we have put pieces together, including sound, puzzles and storyline. Puzzle Progress: Inspired by the cow plant, Weidi designed a puzzle that involves cow plant. Story Progress: Brian has finished all five acts base storyline. Tech Progress: Shawn is working on adding story logic into the skill flow builder. Sound Progress: Ruoxi is working on sound effects for puzzles and ambient sound.
This week our team’s focus is puzzle development. Weidi is working on our puzzle design and Ruoxi helps to find the right sound clips. Meanwhile Brian is working on the story script and Shawn is working on skill flow builder implementation. Weidi designed and built the maze + sound puzzle using skill flow builder and play tested with five people. Here are some of the early prototypes. The following are notes from play testers. The Read more…
This Monday the team presented to guests at Electronic Arts on our project and current progress. Shawn and Brian joined us remotely via Zoom from Pittsburgh. Weidi made our presentation slides and embedded the sound clips into the slides. In addition to three rehearsals, we rehearsed on our own in preparation for Monday’s presentation. Check out our halves presentation below! We had our first playable build on last Thursday. For Monday, we put one more Read more…
The team started the week with writing the storyline. We took faculty’s advice of writing for story first and then adapt the story to Alexa format. We had our first playable build up until Story Act 1 on Friday. The following is the latest one-pager we have. We want to be flexible and open to changes based on actual implementation. That being said, we might add or remove some NPCs but the story structure will Read more…
On Monday, our client gave us a clear direction that the team should go. The team should develop on our spice market demo that we showed in our previous prototype demo, and combine storytelling with puzzle design. Client also recommend the team to use Skill Flow Builder. Timeline We set a very specific timeline for ourselves to keep everything on track. We will develop the storyline first and then add puzzles to the storyline. We Read more…
After our client reemphasized replayability, growing community and more inclusive age group, the team revisited our previous ideas with the question in mind: how can we make it a shared experience that has higher retention rate? Though we still like puzzle-centered adventure game, the team think it’s very hard to make it for a group of people and have them play again and again. (what happens after they solve all the puzzles?) Instead of settling Read more…
This week the team made three prototypes and have iterated at least once before showing them to client on Thursday. From there the team decide to purse the route of puzzle-centered adventure game. Tech side programmer have used Amazon developer console to made a prototype with audio. Audio side we have experimented adding sound effect to Alexa. We all feel that voice largely boosts the experience. Last week our client suggest us to design while prototyping. Read more…