From the halves feedback we received, our team made sure to run by our work towards faculty and our client especially to prepare for the ETC Playtest day. The ETC Playtest Day is a department wide event where guests visit the ETC to visit the project teams and either try out their experiences or playtest their current work. Getting this feedback is extremely helpful for receiving feedback from different demographics that would help Simtopia iterate upon their work.
Simtopia's Experience Designer, Mengqi Wu, gathers important feedback from a younger audience that tried both of Simtopia's building and movement testing prototypes.
The feedback that Simtopia gained from the prototypes were positive and guests could not tear themselves away from building!
Both movement tests for locomotion were also well received and guests found themselves enjoying both movement by headset and touchpad when exploring the space station. Thus the team decided to try to incorporate a way to switch between both of these modes in VR!
While taking in feedback received from guests during ETC Playtest Day and refining on the experience to target those key areas, the team also made sure to progress on the features. Here are some of the development milestones for the week:
- Design:
- Discussion on more purpose within the space station and incorporation of a lab system for this
- AI Interaction discussion
- Lab system interactions
- Creature and player exploration
- Art
- Environment:
- Incorporated environment assets for the green room
- Added lights for the green room
- Characters:
- Finished Robomon and tested within Unity for 2D animated textures
- Wrote glass shader for the creatures’ helmets
- Retopologizing the character and fitting the jetpack onto their backs
- Concepting the design for the other Simimon characters
- Environment:
- Programming:
- Research gathered for the different movement types
- Created two prototypes to test the movements of headset and touchpad locomotion in the space station
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- Integrated new art assets (starts, green room, other updated modules)
- Added simple module selection UI
- Implemented simple creature controlling system and AI states
- Fixed previous bugs (scaling and change of perspective)
- Research gathered for the different movement types
- Sound:
- Discussion of the list of sounds that we will need for the experience
See you next week as we dive into deeper asset implementation and integration based on our playtest feedback!