Week 4: Quarters

This week we had our first faculty-wide check in with ¼’s presentations. This was out first chance to introduce the idea of a multi-day festival out the the ETC so we were a little nervous to see the feedback in relation to that.

Our 1st Proposed Schedule was a three-day event, which raised some concerns in terms of guests interests and workload.
Keeping the spirit of a traditional festival when designing our virtual festival, we began by designing the virtual space as the ETC building, and developing communication features on our platform.
The guest flow we imagined on the day of the event in the virtual space.

Questions from Faculty

After presenting our work to the faculty, the ideas were generally well received. The big questions that we were asked were related to all things that we were expecting. 

  1. Is three days too big of an ask for people to attend? Is it too much for students? To guests? 
  2. How many people are we really expecting for each session?
  3. How are we organizing the queue?
  4. How are we gamifying the experience?
  5. Who is approving these things?

Answering the Questions…

We’ve been considering these questions as a team to think about how to solve these issues for our final deliverable. The question about three days is the really big one because we know that it is a big ask of everyone. We’re considering the possibility of a two day experience as well now to see if that may accommodate schedules better and funnel more people into the experiences at once.

More Discussions in Quarter Sit-downs

Later in the week we had sitdowns with Heather Kelley, Brenda Harger, and Scott Stevens. In those meetings they honed in on the navigation and interactions in the space needing to be as simple as we can possibly make it. The navigation should be thought of as the core gameplay loop to help the guests move around.

We also met with Drew before sitdowns to start talking about how we can set up a framework to get things approved for the festival. We will be setting up a meeting later to talk about this more, but among the first things we would need to be approved are the overall theme and the new schedule. 

Prototyping

With the project this week, we’ve been continuing to prototype our communication features, both text and voice chat. Jim and Alan have been hard at work streamlining the text chat experience and stabilizing the adjacency-based voice chat. We’re hoping to hold a playtest next week to try these systems out and see what guests preferences are for different situations.

We also had our poster up this week designed by Cara. It set the tone of our pixel art style.

From the art side, Cara has been working on establishing the avatar art style. We are still pursuing a 2D pixel art style that will allow customization of the head, torso, and legs. Annie has been prototyping the UI for this customization system, and also the communication design.

We prototyped our UI control in Figma to better imagine the design.

What’s Next?

Looking forward to next week, we are looking to set the theme for the festival this year and also hold a playtest at the end of the week focused on our communication systems. We’ll also be meeting with ETC alumna Sarah Tan who is currently working at Rec Room to go over their systems design and get feedback from her.