The Work This Week:

Week Fourteen was a week of locking in design.

With only one week left in our process, and Softs behind us, it was time to lock in our design. Incorporating the notes we received from Soft Opening, we found ourselves iterating towards our final draft. With a soft lock on content on Friday, and a hard lock next Monday, we worked to take everything we had learned so far and apply it to our game.

Looking forward, it’s a very good time to set our deliverable down. Next week, we’ll need to focus all our energy on collecting the documentation explaining our process, and how to build on it. Because our goal is to deliver a prototype to the client that they can pitch for funding, that documentation will be vital for another design group to take up our work and continue the process.

The Work This Week:

Week Thirteen was a week of prepping for Soft Openings by playtesting.

Soft Opening is a two day period where students at the ETC show off their deliverables to the faculty. They were originally created as a chance for faculty to offer one last piece of advice, or suggest one last tweek, before students began preparing for final presentations. Because these notes are intended to be minor changes and suggest directions to go with polish, we’re expected to have our product “finished” by Softs.  Major changes not only mean that we’re behind in schedule, but also that we’d be making modifications without the benefit of expert feedback.

To make sure that we had our game as ready as it can be for Softs, we’ve been focusing on gathering data through playtesting. We have an idea of how our game works, but it’s important to make sure everyone else does as well. This week, we were able to playtest twice with groups of ETC faculty. This was doubly useful for us; as far as using them as players went, their lack of knowledge of the game meant we could treat them as naive guests, but when it came to notes, they could speak on the design as experts.

Taking those notes and implementing them early in the week, we were able to hold our first full playtest of the game this Friday. This is significant because a full playthrough of the game takes between two to three hours. Due to logistical constraints, any internal playtesters in the building could never dedicate that much time in one sitting. We had playtested multiple parts of the game multiple times, but never as a complete narrative. Bringing in students from the the School of Drama, and taking advantage of CMU canceling classes this Friday for their Spring Carnival, we were finally able to make it work. The knowledge we gained from watching the full two hours of gameplay was invaluable. And, more importantly, we got undeniable confirmation that our full game works how we designed it to.

Aside from a small amount of programming work to do on the app over the weekend, the team is feeling confident going into Softs. With only twenty minutes per group of faculty members, we’re excited to pitch our “finished” product, and see what advice they have on how we can improve it before we put it to bed.

The Work This Week:

Week Twelve was a week of turning ideas into something physical.

Coming off of Playtest Day, we realized our design was in a very good place. The audience reacted exactly how we hoped they would, interactions were consistent, rules were understood, and design intentions came through clearly.  Looking at scope, scale, and what we would like for our final deliverable, we realized that we should stop modifying major mechanics. This put us at feature lock a full week earlier than we had intended.

Because work on design has shifted into iteration and polishing, our focus has turned to detail work. This included figuring out the best way to present our instructions. While our written instructions were clear, they did come across as a fairly imposing block of text. They also read as more intellectual and less emotional, which is a problem we’ve been trying to address across all aspects of design. Our artist, Qiqi, undertook the challenge. Working through the layout as a graphic design problem, she’s been able to help maintain the clarity of the instructions while making them significantly more approachable.

On Tuesday, we had a visit from John Comes, the CTO of tinyBuild and a game developer of over seventeen years. With his guidance, we were able to talk about refining mechanics, an discuss possible end product design.

The team also worked on finalizing our game board. The biggest change involved shifting from a circular board to a simi-circular, amphitheater inspired half-circle game board. In addition to adding thematic resonance the art, the semi-circular board also solved a design problem. Our idea of how to show the text to all six players at the same time had hit a small road-block: physics didn’t work the way we wanted it to. To be able see the projection, players would need to have the phone at eye level. This meant that we either had to raise the phone two feet and still risk not having it at the eye-level of all players, or ask guests to lean down and see it at the level of the table. Neither seemed like good ideas. By getting all players on one side of the table, we’re now able to use a larger font and single line of text for our our caption. We can also use the physical closeness this forces on the players to ease passing physical pieces, like our newly implemented hour glass time, and to encourage actual emotional and physical connections.

With finalized mechanics and an understanding of what the game board will look like, we also started fabricating our game pieces. We had to approach this creatively; our client has asked us not to use plastic.  Our answer came in the form of 1/8″ birch plywood. Using the ETC’s laser cutter, we are able to produce vividly detailed, physically engaging, and aesthetically pleasing wooden game pieces. Our current plan is to make the game board out of the same laser cut birch. The pieces players will use to interact with the board and with each other will be raw crystal, with quartz and citrine matching the established color pallet of the board.

Even though we found feature lock ahead of schedule, our work is far from done. Looking ahead, we now aim to playtest as much as we can in the time we have left, learning from what works, and figuring out how to adjust what does not.

The Work This Week:

Week eleven was spent iterating into playtestable design.

After our Halves presentation, the team sat down to figure out how to best to apply the notes we received. It was important we figured out how do so quickly; Saturday was Playtest Day.  Playtest Day is the semi-annual event that the ETC hosts to bring in outside individuals to the building to playtest our designs. It’s an excellent way to make sure we’re testing with our target demographics, and to ensure we’re allowing fresh eyes to give us feedback.

The early part of the week was spent figuring out what to keep and what to cut. With faculty feedback questioning how viable our hologram projection and light-up board mechanics were, we needed to take a moment and examine what we wanted for our final deliverable. Our choice at the moment is to not abandon the use of tech integration in the board, but to understand that lower tech not only removes barriers to production, but also reduces possible fail-points in the design and play. Looking at lower tech options going forward, we’ll be able to focus on design in a more immediate way, while being able to advise on what possible tech we could recommend for a final draft of the game board.

On Thursday, Axel left to attend the Themed Entertainment Association Summit in Los Angeles, Miriam stepped in as acting producer, and the team buckled down to prepare for the weekend. The the team prepped written materials, physical game pieces, and one more iteration of game play for Saturday.

Playtest Day went off without a hitch. The team was able to playtest our game four times, twice with groups matching our target audience of close, familiar groups, and twice with groups who were essentially strangers. The playtests with our target audiences went incredibly well, with one guest asking to come back and test again with their family. Though our playtests with groups who didn’t meet the definition of our target audience were rougher, they did help us to establish that the text is an incredibly grounding element, regardless.

Moving forward, the team knows we’re getting close to the end of the design cycle. Figuring out the best way to polish our deliverable to our client’s standards is our foremost goal at the moment.