Week7-Prepare for Halves

Overview of Week7
  1. Prepare for Halve presentation
  2. The Balance board demo works!
  3. Make all three demos good for Halve playtest
  4. Talked about physical object direction again, and come up with the magic box idea
Balance board demo works!

This week, we started working on how to bring what we have into a cohesive experience for players during the Halves playtest. Now, we have our High-five and clapping works. Also, players can play with cubes smoothly. And we worked on implement the balance board idea.

Designers build the balance board with two handles on it, in order to let players know where they need to grab. After engineers put them together, we found it’s really engaging to hold a board together and cooperate to keep a ball balanced on the board.

Then in our team meeting, we talked about how can we make these three mini experiences as a cohesive demo. And to make the experience good to playtest. Because of the time limitation, we combine them in a simple but efficient way. We designed a hotkey. We first let our players experience high-five, clapping and chatting in the AR world. And then we press the hotkey and generate some cubes. Players can experience passing and throwing cubes. In the end, we press the hotkey again and let all the cubes disappear and generate the balance board which players can play with. In this case, players can test what we have and give us feedback easily.

Magic box?

After we had the physical object idea, we wanted to narrow it down to a doable idea. We have two questions: Are we going to make the physical object as a decoration? Or are we going to make the physical object to bring surprise to users? After a discussion with Carl and Melanie, we had the idea that we can let the physical object be a magic box. It’s a physical box that players can grab “random” objects from the box! In this way, we can put our social interaction ideas into the box. For example, players can grab some cubes to play with or they can grab a balance board to play the balancing game! We use this magic box as a container to keep generating social activities for players!