This week our team focused on design, preparing for playtests, platform research and branding materials.

Design

Our design team are brainstorming concepts for a new approach. At first, we were at a loss, since there were so many materials to work with and it is hard to decide which direction to go. We finally discovered that we need to focus on two important questions:

1.       How can questions be asked during a storytelling experience?
2.       How can we make a survey fun?

After we answered these main questions, the thinking process became a lot clearer. We researched things kids like (poring through a list of 500 items!) as well as iOS and Android apps they like (that list was only 100 items). Apart from that, we did some research on how to ask questions and categorized our possible questions.

Based on our findings, we developed 21 ideas and presented them to the team and to our advisors. We began to realize that trying to weave the kind of questions we need to ask into a single story with a natural flow would be very difficult. We also realized that being straightforward about doing a survey with children and rewarding them with fun games would be a much better approach.

During our research, we found “Ubooly”, an iPad character with a cute animal cover that interacted with children in a very immersive way. The whole team liked the idea very much and saw the potential to make a lively character to build relationships with the kids. Our instructor John Dessler also liked it and pointed out that it allows us to use various tactics to integrate questions without being limited to a single story.

In the next week, we will summarize our ideas and pitch them to our clients. More polishing of the ideas and narrowing them down to few is required. We also will work on different story components to go with certain questions and question types.

Preparing Playtest

Since we have a lot to decide on our design side, we are looking forward to our first playtest with our demographic. Because we are relying so heavily on a single character, we need children to be engaged enough with the character to answer all the survey questions. We are starting to compile concepts for character appearances so we can test them on our target audience, kids ages 7-14. Also, we need to test what kind of theming, voice and story type kids like most.

Conceptually we feel we are moving in the right direction with a single character who is friendly, funny, and matter-of-fact about the questionnaire. We will test this concept during playtesting as well to see if they would respond better to a character or to a more game-like experience.

We hope to start playtesting with our target group the week of 1/4s so we can be surer we’re taking the right approach.

Branding

Branding materials have been created and we’re looking forward to getting feedback and finalizing them next week! Our design is based on the idea that the edelweiss is a survivor, like children who have been through trauma. Our project will help protect these children from their dark past and move toward a brighter future.

Platform Research

At the beginning of the week, we were researching different game engines and how to export an iOS app on them. We researched Unreal, native iOS and Unity. Unfortunately, since we do not have Apple developer’s account, we cannot test on Unreal. For native iOS, we researched Apple’s new language – Swift – and made a simple project to test how to layout UI with native XCode.

For Unity, we have completed our golden spike!!! In Unity, we can export a project into an XCode project, build, copy and run the application on an iOS device. The process is a little bit complex but we were glad to get something to work. Also, with the newest version of XCode 7, we can export to iOS devices without a developer account. However, we cannot archive the ipa file, so it will make our life a lot easier if we have a dev account.

We also spent some time exploring how to program and use the touch screen inputs. To test clicking a button and moving your finger around, we built a second simple prototype:

You can use your left finger to move the character around and the right finger to plant a flower. The prototype is not perfect: it has some issues with multiple touches and weird UI size. But we do know where the problems are and how to fix them.

Next week the team will mainly be focusing on building a real prototype. We will be building a framework for player interactions, like what will happen (which animation and audios will be played) when the player touches/pinches our character. We are also building a question framework for designers to blend questions into the app.

Production

We met with Garrett from SimCoach to talk about the transfer of this project at the end of the semester. Since Garrett is ETC alumni, he gave us a lot of his experience on ETC projects. We also talked with him about the platform choice and how to smoothly deliver the final project to Simcoach.

We didn’t have much of the product to show at this point, but we will be meeting with him again in a couple weeks to show what we present at 1/4s.