This week was dedicated to getting our experience ready for our Soft Opening. For Softs, we pretty much need to have the entire (albeit unpolished) experience ready from start to finish, so that we can show it off to the faculty. Our work really focused on improving based on our feedback from the playtest session the previous week.
Our introduction was completely reworked. The main pain-point of having the guest place their controller on the table is no more. Our programmers devised a new method of recognizing our main “worktable” surface. Instead of placing the controller on the table, all that is needed is to have the controller be above and somewhat near the surface. We made the Magic Leap read each major surface with a boundary around it. When the controller crosses the boundary, the surface then gets selected as the main playspace. Due to the size of the boundary, it turns out that simply standing next to a table will trigger this, so all we needed to do was add a voice prompt to guide the guest to their table.
To combat uncertainty, we also provided a sample “test file” for Quality Assurance Purposes of testing the Stamp. Using this kind of dialogue to prompt the guest allows us to have more control over what they are doing, while still maintaining the essence of the story.
These changes provided a much better experience for the guest, and certainly alleviated some of the issues we’ve been having.
In addition, we also added in the remaining characters, Mochi and Lumps into the experience, allowing for a complete experience to be shown!
While there is still much finalizing to do, we feel confident that these changes and additions will be very welcomed by the faculty, and will help them see what the completed experience looks and feels like.