Week 8

Week 8 we had an intense sprint! Having just got back from GDC we had a lot to do!

First and foremost we started working on our prototype for halves that’s two weeks from now. During the first half of the week, we finished our weekly meetings and planned our sprint for the week. We had a general sense of the experience we wish to build, so while our tech department worked on setting up Alexa, our design team quickly formulated and executed a playtest.

Playtest: 

Our idea was to develop an experience around cooking! We would be interacting with an AI robot that will be cooking a meal for you, but needs your help in doing it properly. We decided to playtest with actual ingredients! One team-mate played the AI role for this playtest. The image below is a recipe that the AI would possess. He is here to cook a dish for you and you will be evaluating it based on it. The problem the AI will encounter is not being able to identify ‘Bird’ from the emoji (Why do we have emojis? Well that’s how the robots talk to each other duh!) And that’s when the player has to help the AI out by identifying the AI

Guest #1 We realized that the guest found it really funny how the entire experience turned out, simple reason was that the whole action of putting things in a bowl seemed funny and even though the player knew it was failing they just wanted to enjoy themselves. Lesson learned!

Guest #2 This time around we had the Chef Robot(actor) hand over a copy of the menu to the guest but the guest was perplexed as to why were they evaluating a robot that cannot understand how to cook in the first place. Also, the guest was not willing to hold the copy of the recepie and just went with their knowledge of how to cook a chicken noodle soup.

Guest #3 Broke the experience right away when the actor asked if they were here to evaluate the robot’s cooking skills. Going forward we will not ask open ended questions where the guest can break the experience so easily.

Using the learnings from our playtest we decided to go with a simple recipe for halves, where we would build a cooking experience where the AI robot will try to make a sandwich and started building the experience. We have our artist working on art assets and the character model while the team is putting together the experience.

We shall have a working demo soon! See you next week!