Introduction and Overview
August Wilson Cycle is a project created by a team from Carnegie Mellon University Entertainment Technology Center working with August Wilson House, a non-profit organization dedicated to the revitalization of August Wilson’s childhood home and the surrounding the Hill District neighborhood in Pittsburgh. Our goal is to develop an immersive mobile application for high school students who are interested in the history and culture of Hill District as a supplementary educational tool. During his career, August Wilson wrote ten famous plays taking place in Pittsburgh’s Hill District throughout different decades. This mobile application allows
you to explore the Hill District in two of those decades.
Our team is comprised of a software engineer: Zoltan Jing, UI/UX designer: Yifan Deng, 3D artist: Shera Zhan, 2D artist/Narrative designer: Em Tyminski, and producer: Hyoeun Kim. Faculty advisors are Mike Christel and Ralph Vituccio, and the client is August Wilson House.
What went well (or what went right)
Every teammate has a very strong skill set. Even though our team has only one programmer, he was able to manage the whole development workload. Our designers also have various expertise in 2D drawing, photoshop, 2D animation, and 3D modeling. Thanks to their skillsets, our team could quickly build 2D and 3D world in a short amount of time. Even though we had a huge pivot after the Halves, our team was able to redesign the whole
application in a short amount of time and improve our prototypes weekly basis to get meaningful feedback from faculty and clients. Our team communicated with clients very well and built a good relationship with them throughout the semester. We had many inspiring ideas and came
up with many design solutions. Everyone handled pressure and stress well and tried to take responsibility for their part.
What Could Have Been Better
First, our team’s big challenge was remote work at a different time zone. 2 students were in China, 1 student was in Seattle, and 2 students were in Pittsburgh. Because of that, our co-working hours were very limited, and it caused many communication problems. It was hard to sync up to each other’s work progress and make a decision. Until 6 weeks, our team was not
able to work collaboratively enough and had a disagreement about the overall direction of the project. We could have been better spent more time to communicate with each other in order to make sure everyone is on the same page.
Second, our team didn’t have a clear quality bar that is expected of the team. As everyone had different thoughts about the quality of the work, our team took quite a lot of time to make proper expectations for the work output. In addition, our team did not do a good job of communicating
challenges with each other. In case other people thought this work needed improvement, we should’ve challenged each other but we couldn’t.
Third, the schedule was a very important part of our project because we needed to deliver the final product to our clients. However, we were often hard to meet the deadline with unexpected factors. Because of that, our programmer had to work until late at night while waiting for missing
art assets. As a producer, I should’ve set a realistic deadline considering the teammate’s schedule and kept reminding the deadline.
Lastly, documentation was one of the major pain points. Everyone used different design files, and upload separate folders and no one took responsibility for updating the design document in one place. It caused a lot of confusion and hard to track the update when our programmer
integrates the art asset into the application. In the remote setting, we should’ve set the documentation rule in the early stage of the project.
Lessons Learned
We learned a lot while working with clients. Fortunately, we were able to work with 3 board members of August Wilson House who have a professional knowledge of August Wilson, history, black culture, and literature. We were able to get constructive feedback from them, and
they always pointed us in the right direction when we were struggling.
From a product standpoint, we learned a lot about AR interaction design and the limitations of the technology. It was a tough challenge to design for the application combining mobile AR and traditional 2D interaction. However, we had a meaningful semester full of challenges and learnings, and accomplishments. We feel that we achieved what we set out to do.
Similar to that, we learned how to manage our stress levels under a challenging situation with strict deadlines. Overall, it was a great experience for learning how to work with people of different skill sets and backgrounds.
Conclusion
We are very proud of our application and our efforts during this semester. Our final product is a completely playable game with clear instructions and onboarding, and provide an immersive experience comparing to the traditional 2D mobile experience.
We want to thank the August Wilson House for allowing us to take this opportunity and helping us on our journey to making it a success. We have learned so much through the successes and the failures of our semester!