Like any good piece of media these days, it seems only appropriate to have a post-credits scene before we truly put the project to bed. Week Sixteen was one of endings.

On Monday, we presented on our process and product for faculty and the collected student body of the ETC. Summarizing fifteen weeks into fifteen minutes was not the easiest task, but the team made it through clearly, succinctly, and with aplomb.

A majority of the week was spent readying our documentation for Theater of War Productions. In addition to formal documentation, such as design explanation of rules and source code, the team also included our personal observations on the difficulties and benefits we found in translating our client’s existing model in to the tabletop space. The goal behind all of the documentation was that if our client wanted to hand off future design to another group, there would be enough information to enable a smooth transition.

We ended the week, and the project, with Final Playthroughs. Final Playthroughs act as one last chance for the faculty to see our deliverable in action before finalizing our product grade. They finished at noon, and our work was complete.

Thank you for being here for our journey. It was an incredibly experience for the team, and I hope you found something in these blog posts that you can take away as well.

And on week fifteen, we were finished.

Having finalized our design after Softs feedback, our design work work came to an end.

With that in mind, our final work is not quite done yet.

Our next major deadline is Final Presentations, our last opportunity to show our work to faculty and fellow students. After that, we’ll need to finalize our documentation for our client. We’re handing over both formal design documentation about our process, as well as informal notes over what we found trying to translate their framework in to the tabletop space.

And next Friday, for our last deadline, we’ll have final faculty play-throughs, to prove what we have documented and what we have presented over is what we have actually delivered.

But, until then, we can rest easy knowing we’ve done our job well, and done it thoroughly. It’s been a long semester, but we’ve done good work.

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.

This week, we presented for Halves.

The team took Halves presentation very seriously. In addition to being part of our grade for the semester, Halves are also our first chance to show off our project to the world outside our client and team. We understood that we needed make our first impression a good one.

Beginning on Monday, we took the base information we had gathered and started trying to make a coherent presentation out of it. Working as a team, we were able to construct a proper narrative about our design process to this point. By Tuesday, we were ready to present to our faculty advisers, and get their feedback. Our biggest note was that we needed to show our work more. They meant both that we had to show the work we had accomplished more, as well as making it transparent as to how we had arrived at this stage in our design. It was a necessary but strange note to be told that we needed to brag about how unique and ground breaking our work is; after ten weeks of being inside of the project, it’s easy to forget that the things we’re doing every day really do make our work special.

To accommodate for the seventeen projects at the ETC this semester, presentations were split up over three days; Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Home Front was scheduled to present on present on Friday. While we understood that more time for our presentation meant higher expectations, we also took advantage of being able to watch ten other teams present. By observing what worked and what was less successful in the other presentations, we were able to create goals to iterate towards.

Even with our focus being on Halves, the team didn’t sit idle with the design this week. In preparing for our presentation, it became clear that we would need to plainly articulate a sample round of play. This documentation had not been formalized; because we were iterating gameplay in fairly substantial ways between our last version and the current draft, most of our mechanical instructions for the game were still being given orally. Using Halves as our catalyst, the team produced a formal Use Case of our game, and created a recorded demo to be used as part of our presentation.

This week, Qiqi was also able to finalize a second version of the game art, which was approved by our client. With this version of the art, and the recorded play demo, we now had our most current design available to use for our presentation.

By Friday morning, we had incorporated our instructors notes, formalized our presentation, and practiced enough to feel comfortable speaking in front of our classmates and professors. It was time to present. Our slot was the last for the day, making us the 17th and final project to present this week.

For the record, it went quite well.

We’ll be getting formal feedback next week, and will continue onward with design. New priorities are to build a prototype of the game board, further test our current iteration of mechanics, and refine content as we move forward.

The Work This Week:

Week nine was spent preparing for Halves.

Halves presentations at the ETC are our first chance to publicly share our work. Presenting to students, faculty, and various clients, we are given fifteen minutes to explain our project, and our process. Afterwards, there is five minutes avail for questions. They serve to let us practice our formal presentation skills, and to allow faculty not intimately involved in our project an insight into our work.

With Matt and Miriam off at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, the rest of the team started gathering materials for our presentation. As Qiqi finished the second draft of the art, Apoorva continued to work on our app, and Axel began structuring the presentation. While the work wasn’t terribly exciting, it was still vitally important to staying on track.

Regarding new work this week; the team has figured out a way to make text from the app on the phone visible to all players at the same time. Using a simple Pepper’s Ghost like setup, it is possible to make a rudimentary hologram above the phone screen, visible on all sides and clear enough to be read easy. The drive behind this concept is to keep players from interacting with the phone as much as possible. Every time a player touches the phone, we run the risk of pulling them out of the world we are trying to build. We expect to take this idea into a second prototype next week.

With Miriam and Matt back in the office on Friday, we finalized the rough draft of our Halves slide-deck and sent it off to our advisers for consideration. With our presentation scheduled for next Friday, we’ll have more time to prep as the week goes on, but we’ll want to make sure not to ignore our continued work on design as well.

The Work This Week:

Week eight was spent iterating and playtesting.

Capitalizing off of the momentum of last week’s breakthroughs, we aimed to get our initial version of the game in to as many hands as possible. This included several ETC groups, our project mentors, and one group of students from the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama. The play testing helped us confirm a few design ideas that had mostly been hunches, and also brought a few issues into clearer focus.

Also worth noting: We had our Quarters Sit-Downs, a chance for our advisers to speak with team members one-on-one, and check in regarding how we’re doing so far.

The first positive that we were able to confirm was that our target audience was exactly where it should be. By aiming for a target audience of players that have a solid sense of familiarity with each other, we were able to break through some of the initial barriers to conversation before the game even began. While it was observed in most of our playtests, it was confirmed in one playtest where the guests did not know each other well. Conversation quickly diverged from the game, and there was a good deal of posturing as people tried to not look week in front of strangers and classmates.

We also started to see direct effects of how emotionally grounding the text was. Every time the text was played, the game became both more personal on an emotional level, and less personal intellectual level. This always gave a solid boost to investment in the game, and conversation in general.

One fear we had confirmed was that our questions, and the current interaction of the game, was too intellectual. We were offering the players safe options to think their way out of situations we want to be visceral and emotional. This meant that we were back to the drawing board on the questions we wanted to ask our players.

We ended the week with a client call, running all the progress we had made past Ms. Goldsmith. She was a huge help in focusing our art direction, confirming mechanics, and helping us find the emotional core of the text. More than anything, she was a reminder that our client had already developed a process that worked.

Theater of War Productions has been working towards these sorts of emotional engagements for the last ten years. Going back to our original task of adapting their live performance, we need to understand that we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Drawing from their lessons and successes will help us to avoid making mistakes they have already solved, and allow us more time to explore the new areas we hope to take their performance in to.

With next week being Spring Break, the team will be taking a small hiatus. Afterwards, we’ll be getting right back to iteration, and preparing for our Halves presentation.

The Work This Week:

Week seven was spent taking our ideas finding ways to put them into practice.

On Monday, we spoke with two experts in the field. Lance Weiler, a story teller, filmmaker, and professor at Columbia, was able to speak with the team about focusing our tone. Even though our goal of breaking down stigma around death was clear, our approach towards the subject was still very general. Mr. Weiler helped us understand the importance of how we needed to approach tone and feeling, as well as making sure our game as actually enjoyable to experience.

We were also able to speak with Tim Sweeney, an alumnus of the program and a developer at Schell Games. Mr. Sweeney was able to help us approach the mechanics of our experience. His advice was hugely beneficial for helping to ensure an engaging experience, and to make sure that the interactions our game used would lead to experiences we were aiming for.

We then met with Jessie Schell, a professor at the ETC and CEO of Schell Games. Mr. Schell was able to help us better understand the framework we wanted to use to present our game. Following his advice, we were able to better examine the benefits and and risks we were asking the player to expose themselves to. This conversation is also where we found the inspiration to frame our narrative around the idea of legacy, instead of just approaching death head on.

We used Wednesday as a time to re-frame our thoughts towards out interactions. The version of our game that emerged from our concentrated design was playtested the next two days

With two playtesting sessions on both Thursday and Friday, our initial player feedback was incredibly encouraging. Mechanics worked as they were intended, players’ reactions matched what we expected, and incorporating the text provided a very healthy grounding and distance which encouraged conversation.

Building from the success of our playtests, were are excited to be moving past brainstorming, and digging into iteration.