Dev Blog Week 10
Remote playtesting
Due to the current situation of the virus, our original plan of playtesting at EA has been canceled. We have to find another way to test our game. During the meeting, we came up with an idea of set up a video meeting and let the playtesters interact with our Alexa devices through webcam. This is theoretically possible if all the conditions are perfect. But some conditions are critical such as internet connection is stable, the playtesters have a high-quality microphone, etc. It is especially challenging when the internet is not stable. If the utterance from the playtesters is distorted by the noise, Alexa may not be able correctly recognized it.We/ve tested this internally and found out that this will create a bad experience during the playtesting. The playtesters can not tell whether it is a bug or Alexa is too sensitive. Therefore, we need to find a better way to conduct the playtest in the following week.
Friend of the world visual content
Although we are designing a voice-driven game, there are some Alexa devices that come with a screen. Our client mentioned in the design document that we have to have visual content of the game that can make the experience more immersive. We surveyed the technology and made the first demo using our team logo as a prototype for proof of concept. At the same time, we created a series of images from the game that can be used as the visual content to tell our story.
New story tracks: Musical Genius
At the same time polishing the first story track, we started to design the next step. To take advantage of the voice interaction, we think a story about music is the most intuitive, since most of the people like to listen to music, and it has a lot of freedom for us to spread our creativity in the sound design. We went through the original Aspiration: Musical Genius in The Sims 4, and made some adaption of the outline to create our story. We combined one of the optional content that we’ve discussed at the beginning of the semester: skills. It creates a huge satisfaction for the player to level up their Sim in some way. In this story track, this is the instrument skill such as piano, guitar, and violin. We make use of the original sound effect in the game that distinguished the skill level in a fun way. Players can here their Sim played poorly at the beginning of our game and eventually reached a higher level. Moreover, we designed our story closely with this skill system, that different skill level can lead to different branch of story in the game.