This Monday the team presented to guests at Electronic Arts on our project and current progress. Shawn and Brian joined us remotely via Zoom from Pittsburgh. Weidi made our presentation slides and embedded the sound clips into the slides. In addition to three rehearsals, we rehearsed on our own in preparation for Monday’s presentation.

Check out our halves presentation below!

We had our first playable build on last Thursday. For Monday, we put one more act of story to the build and showed them to our guests after the presentation. Some feedback we received from guests include:

  1. Guests want to check the status such as “where am I” during the experience. Shawn has added this function to our build. Now, in our experience, you can stop and ask Alexa “where am I” anytime and will get the responses such as “you are at Ms. Chilirosa’s beauty salon”.
  2. Some guests feel currently it is like listening to an audio book and wish there can be more interaction. We haven’t put the puzzle parts into our build yet. Once we do that there will be more interactions players can do in our experience.

Iteration on the Experience

We have made small twists to the story. Instead of stench as a curse from the spell caster, we changed the stench to a mistake of an alchemist. There are five acts in the story right now. We are trying to add natural stopping points into the experience after each act so player can come back.

This Friday we have story nodes written out as well as a high level puzzle ideas. Next week, we will start to work individually on our parts. Ruoxi will record and prepare the audio clips. Shawn will work on the Skill Flow Builder. Weidi will continue the puzzle design. Brian and Xiao will continue to work on the story. By the end of next week, we aim to have puzzles integrated into the story.

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