This week we began production on simulation 1, detailed the designs of simulations 2 and 3, completed a draft of our design document, and added filled out our backlog with new stories for our newly designed features.
The beginning of the week comprised of mostly setting up the basic mechanics of the FaceID simulation, specifically the data collection and user identification steps. By the end of the week, we got the basic functionality operational with placeholder images. You can see demos of these operations below.
After some internal playtests, we decided to switch the swiping directions to more closely resemble typical swiping mechanics found in similar apps. We also noticed that the perspective of the player in this simulation is unclear, are they an AI or a user. Because of this disparity, we are exploring alternative UI designs to suggest that the player is inside the phone, not just matching photos.
In addition, to this work we completed a draft of the design document for our game. You can read that below.
This is a living document that will undoubtedly change over the production process. On that subject, some large changes to our narrative have been made. Most notable of these is the shift from the player acting on an ethics committee, to the player being part of a focus group. The other non-player characters (NPCs) are other citizens that would fit in to our target demographics. The meeting is led by another NPC: a moderator and AI researcher. This decision was made because the player will most likely lack information about AI and we didn’t want to alienate them with AI jargon. The focus group members will also be able to voice excitements and concerns about the applications of computer vision presented in the simulations.
We ended the week by adding new stories to our agile backlog for our newly designed simulations and the interstitial scenes. We prioritized the new backlog and planned our next sprint accordingly. This sprint we will be focusing on polishing the first simulation and storyboarding/writing the focus member scenes.