On our way to Parson’s School of Design in New York City, we came up with an extensive list of questions we needed answered. We wanted to ensure that in our limited time in the space, we got to know everything we’d need from the visit. Here is the extensive list with the answers we discovered interspersed with fun pictures for your enjoyment.
Room / Seating
- How small can the font be so that the farthest audience can still read it from screen? 22pt
- How many circles of people of what size can be fit in there? 10 by 10
- Can the screens be different? Yes, on two different output systems
- Do we have a stage? No
- Do you have a table? Yes
- How will people come into the room? Fire safe doors. People open them. Double set of doors.
- Can we close the door? What is the policy about people entering after it’s started? Someone watching door.
Lighting
- Can we do themed lighting? No
- Where and how and who controls lighting? Back of room panel, broadly
- How bright is the projector compared to lights? Very good
Sound
- Do you have a microphone? Lapel mic? If not, mic stand? Ask ahead of time, lapel is available —
- Can we bring our own? Not needed
- Can we output microphone and our audio in same system? Yes
- How many microphones? Plenty —
- Do speakers have good bass? Emily checked
- Mono, stereo, surround sound? Mono
PC / Cables
- What type of video inputs? HDMI
- What type of audio inputs? HDMI
- Cable lengths? Bring HDMI and ethernet extension —
- Distance of VR from PC? Few feet
- Do we need our own PC monitor? No
- Laptop? Bring our own
Set-Up / Clean-Up
- How much time do we have? TBD, send run time —
- Do we have help? Yes, Mary Rose and dedicated tech
- Do we have to clean up after ourselves? Yes
Wi-Fi
- How good / bad is it? Decent
- Do people need a code to get access? They’ll have that
- How is 4G? Bad
This trip did a lot of really great things for us. It confirmed that the majority of our design doesn’t need to change. Additionally, it told us exactly what we’d need to bring to New York with us this summer. There were a few important things we learned such as the size of the screens and the number of audience semi-circles we’d be able to fit. It was also nice meeting some of the people in person we’ve been working with from the Games For Change team.
The rest of this week was mainly dedicated to finishing build things for the new version of the game for our Soft Open on Monday. Knowing that nothing major needed to be changed was important, but once we learned that, we needed to make sure that things like our phone app and Unity system were bug-free for our demonstration for the faculty. Next week, we’ll present this Soft Open version of the game to our teachers and adjust course from there. It will be in many ways our first complete playtest with all the new game systems. Our plan is to treat is as such.
