Week ten update:
This week we have spent time taking in feedback from halves and developing groundwork to launch us into finals. Now that we have an idea of what we want our final product to look like, we brainstormed some quick ideas of what entry and exit systems we still haven’t tested. This week we have selected a few of the ideas to begin implementing: Elevator and Level streaming.
Our tech team has been working on overhauling our multiplayer framework. Previously our prototypes ran two different scenes for the guest and host, and when the guest connected they would be loaded into the host’s scene. Now, this is how it would ideally work in the future – but we have been running into a lot of problems with the loading times for the guest that detract from our experience. In addition to this, running everything in multiple scenes makes it harder for the designers to create features in a single player environment and send them off to the tech team to get implemented. Thus, we are rebuilding our framework to have both the guest and host in the same scene, just in different parts. When the guest accepts an invitation, they will be moved to the host’s area of the scene.
This overhaul will greatly help our designers create single player prototypes for entry and exit that can then be used by our programmers as reference for implementation in the networked build.
In addition to creating these single player prototypes, our design team has also been working on refining the garden space. This is the first virtual space that our team has built from the ground up, and we have been testing variations internally among the team to iterate on the comfort and layout of the space. By early next week, we hope to begin testing entry and exit methods in it.
Speaking of playtesting, we have after halves begun to pursue conducting research under IRB certification so our client can reference the data we collect. Most of our playtesting and data collection thus far has been formative for us, informing our design process rather than being ultimately useful for formal documentation.
In addition to this shift in our playtesting, we have gotten started on documenting our work up until this point. We have created a folder on CMU’s Box to afford us security for playtest information, and have begun organizing work and documents into a master data inventory for ease of use.
Moving forward, we hope to finish our next testable build midweek next week and start testing in earnest that weekend.