Month: February 2017

This week the Tuesday Tales team focused on finalizing our game idea while creating our app’s golden spike. After quarters, the team took the faculty’s feedback into consideration and tried to merge the ideas of using Kaiju with the social mechanics of the Caravan game. This led us to a new idea that was based around representing players’ relationships through Kaiju. When we pitched this to Legendary, they had some concerns about it limiting the game to require friends to play together.

 

The team pulled together for our gold spike to ensure that we can achieve the basics we will need for any experience we choose to make. This included map display, getting phone GPS coordinates, and receiving data from spatial. This gave us the chance to get a better idea of what and how quickly we can produce our experience. As a team, we were able to get the basic features implemented and working in the week.

 

This week the Tuesday Tales team focused on the feedback we got from Legendary and presenting our progress to the ETC faculty. The team met with Legendary early this week and got feedback on our pitches. Legendary liked the social responsibility and growth of the Caravan game but also liked how the Kaiju game idea integrated with the IP that they own. As such, we’ve been working hard to figure out how the strengths of these 2 ideas.

See our pitch video here

 

This week was quarters at the ETC and, as such, the team needed to present our progress to the faculty. The team told the faculty about the pitches that were given to Legendary and summed up the feedback from the day before.The faculty felt that the team was on track compared to past successful projects. However, the team needs to nail down a final idea and start building the framework to make it successful.

This week the Tuesday Tales team focused on pitching our ideas to our client, Legendary Entertainment. The three ideas were narrowed down to two and Jonathan and Emre worked to create videos to help convey these ideas to Legendary. This week has also had the team wrapping up all the administrative stuff needed for quarters.

 

The first idea is the merchant game that has remained similar to how it was last week. Players would be able to set up markets that are tied to real world locations, and then buy and sell goods at them to gain profit. They would also be able to work with their friends to set up automated trade routes and gather profit that way. This idea would focus more on exploring how to keep players involved over long periods of time and growing the user base through marketing and social pressure.

 

The second idea is the Tamagotchi game that has been heavily modified this week. The game is now focused around players raising Kaiju (a Japanese word that describes giant monsters) and destroying cities. This requires them to go from marker to marker to get new resources and grow. There is also a session based component to it. Players would need to compete in time and space limited events in order to convince a Kaiju to give them an egg which would allow them to gather more Kaiju. This idea would help to explore the areas of getting players to switch from types of interactions inside the app.

 

The team has been working on the presentation we will give to faculty next week at quarters. We are hoping to focus on presentation on getting advice on long-term testing and playtesting with main campus. The project schedule, scope, goals, and budget were finalized this week and are in to Drew for approval.

 This week the Tuesday Tales team worked to narrow down the ideas from our brainstorm into a few ideas we will pitch to Legendary. The 3 ideas that we had rise to the top were match based gameplay, a merchant game, and a Tamagotchi-esque game.

 

The match based idea is taking a location based experience but only running it with a small group in a fixed area for a certain amount of time. This could mean treasures being stashed around the Carnegie Mellon campus and 10 friends competing to find the most in 30 minutes. It could also mean 2 teams competing against each other in order to control markers and discover the other team’s base. Nicky has been leading the exploration and playtesting of this idea.

 

The merchant game is a location based experience based around buying and selling at merchants. For example, I could go the store at Cohon university center and it might have a lot of food or wheat that it is willing to sell for cheap. I could then go to another store, for example the ETC, which doesn’t have much food and thus is willing to buy it for a lot and make a profit. Over time, I would be able to automate this process and be able to invest in stores so that I don’t have to be actively moving between stores to participate. Jonathan has been leading the exploration of this idea.

 

The Tamagotchi game is a location based experience where players would be going to markers in order to care for monsters that they could raise or collect. Right now, we’re exploring a couple didn’t iterations of this core concept. In one, the player is given one monster and has to go between markers in order to help meet it needs, such as hunger or grooming. In the second idea, the monsters reside at the markers and players grow relationships with them by visiting the markers and meeting the monsters needs. In our last idea, the player is going around to the different markers in order to gather materials to make the monster, such as bones that together make a dinosaur. Emre has been leading the exploration of this idea.

 

We also started running physical playtests on our ideas. The first one to be playtested was the merchant game. We had 6 ETC students from outside the project running around the building trying to trade sticky notes between Emre, Jonathan, and Matt. The goal was to have the most amount of money at the end of 15 minutes. It gave us a lot of good feedback and showed the potential of the idea.

Jin has been working with each of the ideas in order to help visualize them. This is aiding us in both our internal communication of the ideas and our pitches to Legendary. For example, Jin has been working with Jonathan to make concept art to convey the idea that you are leading an arabian caravan running from town to town seeking your fortune.

 

Xiao has been hard at work creating the promotional material for our project. This includes the team poster and half sheets. These will help us convey the location based nature of our project and describe our project and it’s goals to visitors and faculty.