Good to see you again,

Week 12 marks a very important milestone for us.  We have entered the playtesting phase of the project.  What this means, is that we are feature complete for our minimum viable product, and can begin completing the research component of the project.  It took a lot to get to this point, especially this past week, so I’m excited to talk about that.

Art, Animation, and Audio, are all essential to almost any digital experience, and ours is no exception.  This week, continued to complete animations to create more immersive and believable personalities.  Here’s a few examples:  Animations, Audio

We are currently making sure all of those animations and bits of dialogue are in the experience for our guest’s pleasure.

Our engine has been getting better and better throughout the week.  With our behaviour tree system complete, we have focused on making that system more usable, reliable, and feature rich.  This includes features to trigger movements more fluidly, more animations, enabling audio, and most importantly giving design a greater ability to influence how Mixy behaves.

The real meat of what happened this week was our design work.  Besides the usual bug fixing, we focused on iterating to improve the character’s personality, and ability to fill a role.  This meant, of course, playtesting.  We tested with many of our classmates, and noticed a few consistent observations.  Examples include the audio needing more variety, the character needing to face the guest more often, and the character being difficult to track at times.  We are excited to take these bits of feedback and many others and use them to improve the experience as a whole.  

That’s pretty much it for this week.  Expect future blogs to be heavily focused on playtests, and how we made gains against our research goals, and much less on what we actually did.

Cheers,

~mixAR