After a great week at GDC, team URSA reconvened and began preparations for our Halves presentations in which we present to the faculty the current status of our project.
We spent the first few days of the week rehearsing and focusing our presentation to explain our process and our project as clearly as possible. After much preparation, we felt ready to present on Wednesday. The presentation went well, and we received excellent questions from the faculty about how our game would resonate with the players and how we would ensure that they took away the correct message.
Following Halves, we met to discuss the feedback we received and what our next steps were. We took a hard look at the schedule and made certain our next steps were within scope. We also had discussions about the clarity of our game in its current state and how we could make it better. We then spent time preparing for our immediate next step, which is visiting Washington Square Park in New York City and testing the game within the space.
On Friday, the team met to conceive new event interactions and made final preparations for New York City. We are taking an overnight Greyhound bus and will arrive in the city on Saturday morning. Once there, we plan to test the accuracy of our GPS system within the park, the placement of the various zones, and the flow of the gameplay within the space. We plan to also test whether or not we will need physical markers that correspond to the virtual zones, and test the ambient noise in the park to assess how much sound can be heard while playing the game.
Next week, we plan to run a quick paper playtest regarding whether or not the art assets are portraying the correct tone and provide the users with a clear understanding of what is occurring in the game. We will also be preparing for the User Test day that Janice is organizing and will use this day to test our game with a larger group of players.
Hello! This week we ran our first official playtest and continued to develop our project.
Monday was a big day for us. We were all very busy preparing for our first playtest with naive guests. We ran two playtests with ten participants in each test. We filmed the playtests and had the participants fill out a survey at the end of their test. Here is some of the footage that we captured from the test:
We learned a lot from our playtests. Most importantly, we learned that most people thought that our game was fun, but unfortunately we also learned that few fully understood what it was about. We had anticipated both of these facts, but it was good to confirm them through external objective testers.
Next week is the Game Developer’s Conference and half of our team will be attending, so we continued to push through Spring Break to get as much done as we could. The feedback from our playtest was great, and from that feedback we knew what we needed to do next. We finalized the basic story for the game, and Jack began theming our User Interface. The tech team began adjusting the back-end of our build to be adaptable for the events that occur in the story of our game.
We have also started preparing for our Halves Presentations. With this playtest under our belt, we felt that we were ready to begin creating our presentation. Everyone added their part, and once we get back from GDC, we will begin practicing the presentation as well.
Next week, while half of the team is at GDC, the rest of the team will continue to implement and test the story and events in our game. We look forward to this next wave of feedback and testing.
This week, we focused our efforts on preparing for our first official playtest.
We started the week with a conference call with Greg Trefry from Come Out and Play Festival, which is a large outdoor game festival that occurs in New York and San Francisco every year. He gave us some very helpful insight into running a live game with a large number of people outside in New York City.
Our tech team focused their efforts applying GPS functions to our game. The first thing we wanted to test was whether the game could tell when you were in one location versus another. There was much testing. Ken and Alex were constantly running outside in the cold to test.
On Wednesday, we tested this first iteration as a team The test included only one location mapped by GPS. We tested to see if the other phones could recognize and respond to the location we set. After this test, the tech team began working to implement more GPS locations, and also began positioning them to real world locations outside of our building. They also created a GPS accuracy test, which we sent to Tim’s friend in New York City. She and another person walked around Washington Square Park and the test recorded their accuracy. There were two phones used in the accuracy test, an iPhone 4S and a Samsung Galaxy SIII. We discovered that the Samsung Galaxy’s GPS is far less accurate than the iPhone. Using the information gathered from this test, the tech team could more accurately position the GPS markers so that they not interfere with each other.
At the same time, Jack was creating the assets for our first iteration of the User Interface. After our first iteration test, we made some changes to the User Interface. Jack then dove in to create new assets for the next playtest. The research team continued to do more research into the issue as well as researching the emotional tone of other games about social issues.They met later in the week to discuss their findings. They created a list of events and obstacles to be included in the game based on the research they had done.
After our client meeting on Friday, we are pushing hard through the weekend to have a playable prototype. We are planning on having a playtest on Monday, outside of the ETC. We also plan to start preparations for Halves Presentations next week.
Week 7: Initializing
Having received the green light from our client and our advisors, we hit the ground running this week and started crafting our game.
On Monday, we created the first rough digital prototype of our game in Unity. We used this as a guide for our development team. Our programmers then did some research of Node.js to figure out the best way to create this same experience in HTML5 and for multiple users to play at once. By Thursday, we had another prototype that allowed multiple players to access and play the prototype from different computers. This proved to be a success and as a team, we also found it to be entertaining to play!
Once we had our first tech prototype, our team began working on our product backlog to help us figure out what we wanted to include in this game and to prioritize our tasks to make for the most efficient production schedule. Jack began working on some concept art for the game, specifically the User Interface. Tim, Lisa, and Janet continued to research the social issue in more depth so as to obtain some hard numbers and data that we could build our game around.
On Friday we met with our faculty advisors and later our client, and we showed both of them the prototype that we created. Overall they seemed pleased and provided us with some helpful feedback to guide us along in the process.
Next week we plan to create another prototype that includes some art assets. We will also be testing the GPS and potentially other positioning/tracking technologies. We are hoping to conduct a small playtest at the end of the week.