Category: Uncategorized

This week we can’t do major changes. The programmers and UI designer worked on making the tool more polished. We showed it to our client and they think it’s easy to understand. The puzzles are all finished. We planned to do the handoff this Friday, however we have the open house event and also there’s more time we need to prepare the final and thus we reschedule it. Hopefully we can do it next week!

As for the finals, we’re working on the content and also rehearsal to make the presentation smooth. It will be our final final presentation so we want to do it well!

 

This week we have our soft opening. We got great feedback from faculty. We tried to tell the story in a more themed way and it was a success.

Our programmers are finalizing the tool and web app. For the web app we worked on mobile version first. This week we also worked on the desktop version.

Our game designer finalized everything about the ARG. Story, text, puzzles, activities, and flow. We’re also planning to head to our client and thus finished a facilitation document on how to run the experience. We did internal testing – both as the librarians and the teens. There are some parts that are confusing and we thus changed them.

We’re also working on the outline for our final presentation. Hopefully can get it done as early as possible.

This week our game designer completed all puzzles and began work on hand-off documentation. He also finished text for the story. We also playtested puzzles at high-school and made adjustments based on feedback.

For the tool, we got feedback from faculty that it would be good to test with librarians. Considering the accessibility to our client, we then decided to reach out to the school librarians. We got the chance to talk to Jill, who is the librarian at Hunt. We tested the tool with her and also share our process. She gave us some great feedback for iterations. Some are out of scope, like having the tool to be themed as the puzzle stories. She is quite positive about our progress!

We’re also working on collecting stock images for future instagram promotion. Since it will be spoiler if we put too much story, mostly the content will be the initial story. The purpose of the postings are triggering teens who haven’t tried the puzzles to try.

We also prepare for softs. Our programmers worked hard on finishing the features and be able to demo next week.

This week we went to Elizabeth Forward to learn more about their media center. It was a blast!

We learned the progress they’ve made, and it was a great experience to see how teens are happy and relaxed in the space they own. We then collected the images and wrote down our notes about how our clients can make the space better.

This week we also went to visit the marketing manager in Carnegie Library to learn their  marketing strategies on teens. Below are our main takeaway:

• Teens also need to own space on social media. The importance of teen generated content -> ipad passing around libraries.
• Make the account authentic.
• Shy away from events promotion. Teens are sensitive
• The target audience is not necessary only teens. It could also be parents and educators – who can spread out the information.
• When it comes to creating a new account, the traditional marketing strategies work best. Advertising online and flyers in library.  

Other than the research, we also worked on the puzzle iterations and tool development. Next week we will have our playtest in the library so we were also working on it.

This week we had a internal usability testing for our game customization tool. Our UI designer worked on the usability testing plan. It is really helpful to get feedback on the overall flow. There’s some key takeaways:

1. There will only be 1 person editing on 1 puzzle.
2. Some terms could be confusing(ex. story, node, template)
3. User should be able to have different work flow – either to work on the flow first, or work on individual puzzle
4. The display of the flows can be complicated.
5. The flow and the editor page should stay together.  

Our future design will be iterated based on these findings.

As for the ARG puzzle game, our game designer finished up 2 new Puzzles and started work on the story framework. He also worked on the setting and planning for the Playtest day on the weekend.

 

This week we have our halves presentation on Monday. It’s so great that our clients, Kathy and Joe, joined us.

For our presentation, we got some great questions and feedback. For example, for the extendability of this puzzle game, teens can be the best source for the libraries to further create more puzzles. We would further come up with plans for all the feedback

As for the initial hook plan, we did research on other library teen accounts. Our UI designer discussed with our game designer to come up with the material for instagram ad posting. We think it could be a good way to approach the teens in Ashtabula, Ohio. Our UI designer used squarespace to quickly create a website for testing. Basically telling the intro story and having one puzzle on the website.

We had this instagram set up and run starting from saturday night to sunday night. We’ll see how it goes next week!

As for our ARG games, our game designer created 2 new puzzles this week. We are also ready for our playtest this weekend!

Part of our team were out for GDC2018 this week. The remaining members at Pittsburgh worked to improve our interface, made new iterations, and prepared for next week’s mid-semester presentation (a.k.a. halves).

Realizing the game customization tool must meet high usability standards, we improved on the basic interface prototype which the programmers have been working on. Our UI designer had an in-depth discussion with our game designer and programmers, starting to produce a brand new mock up for the tool interface with the goal of balancing function and simplicity.

We also visited Edgewood High School in Ashtabula again to playtest our newest prototype #3. This version features so far the most teen “curated” themes, based on the interests we learned from them. For instance, one of the puzzle requires recognizing some of the trendiest young youtubers. It might prove challenging to people of a different generation — such as ourselves. Haha. But perhaps the most shining feature of this iteration is a story behind the puzzles, about a fictional mystery surrounding an old reactive metal plant from actual Ashtabula local history. Our design did careful research to piece together this narrative, hoping to both appeal to the teens and stay relevant to the community where they come from. The result of the playtest showed consistent correlation between difficulty of puzzles and the motivation they generated in teens. The current adjusted challenge curve seemed to work better than before. However, we still had a lot to do with “hooks”. Analytics showed that the some playtesters landed on the website but they didn’t proceed.

Playtesting feedback also pointed to the currently crude look of our online puzzles. To address this, we began to redesign the look of our puzzle website and rethink how to streamline the interaction so that it will be consistent and intuitive for both the players and librarians who will be customizing these web pages in the future.