Neerav, Brian, and Romain test our digital prototype using various mobile devices and a laptop connected to a TV. Good job Romain and Neerav!
Photo © Jaewan Park.
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Team BarrelEye testing our paper prototype.
Some weeks, it feels like you spend more time talking about your game than building it. Team BarrelEye experienced that feeling this week as we prepared a design presentation hot on the heels of our pitch. Everybody has a hand in preparing our presentations, which takes time – we hope to use the slides we have created to quickly template future presentations.
Monday was full of planning. Our engineers met to discuss the game’s architecture, consider the challenges we are most likely to encounter down the road, and prepare a list of tasks they need to complete over the next two weeks. There were also a couple of design meetings to clarify details that we had to include in our Wednesday presentation. Over lunch we shared some of our experiences so far with West-Turn and agreed to meet later to share playtest results. We also had individual advisor meetings and, bit-by-bit, performed our first Scrum pulldown to begin our first official sprint. Tuesday and Wednesday flew by as art and production prepared for the presentation, and engineering started a prototype.
Wednesday afternoon we presented to eight members of the OCCO team, along with our advisors. We shared our research, describing a few of the games we are drawing from. We gave a more complete overview of our design, specifically focusing on the core game loop to find the fun as soon as possible. Finally, we presented our playtesting plan for the next two weeks. Our goal is to test a paper prototype on Friday of this week, and to begin a Unity prototype that will be networked for internal testing on Tuesday. On Friday the 21st we will invite the other ETC teams to help us playtest that prototype, so that at Quarters on the 26th (also our next OCCO milestone) we can present playtesting results, a revised design, and a roadmap to alpha.
The OCCO team provided us with great feedback, and revealed some ways that they will guide us as we proceed with the project. They were very interested in how we can make the game work for a trade show setting, from making the TV screen attract attention, to designing a multiplayer game that can be demoed to a single guest. After our meeting we had smaller conversations that lent further insight into our design. We were also asked to turn this presentation into a video, and future presentations as well – we’ve found it’s a great tool to make our presentations clear and direct.
Jaewan controls the “TV” during our playtest.
On Thursday and Friday we were happy to spend time with John Dessler, who is visiting from Pittsburgh for a few days. He gave a workshop on brainstorming and the creative process, and also took time to sit down with our team and talk about our project. John helped us anticipate some of the hardest challenges we will come across this semester, both from a product perspective and from a teamwork perspective. Thanks John!
By the end of the week we finished our paper playtest and had an early prototype running on a phone, so we feel good about our current progress. We also had our short weekly update with Ben, and we continue to struggle with a few IT issues but for the most part it’s not slowing us down.
Even in a week of talking (and listening!) we’ve found that with good teamwork we can get work done. Better, we can learn to take advantage of valuable feedback from the talented people that surround us to make our game better than we originally imagined. Next week we have no major presentation so our focus will be on prototyping and playtesting, continuing to actively seek that feedback from our teachers, clients, and peers. Expect great things from team BarrelEye!
The BarrelEye Team (clockwise from left): Romain Deciron, Neerav Mehta, Brian Lee, Brad Buchanan, Jaewan Park, Eren Song, Haewon Nam.
Hello from BarrelEye! We are a team of seven Carnegie Mellon students working with Electronic Arts to create a connected living room experience utilizing Smart TV technology. We are thrilled to be working with the Office of the Chief Creative Officer at EA this semester, and we’re looking forward to building a new and different experience with their assistance. We hit the ground running on our first day. After an orientation to the Silicon Valley campus and assembling our workspace we walked into a boardroom with the EA team and learned about our task for the semester. They’ve given us an intense production schedule that will begin with some rapid prototyping on the technology and research on related experiences. It was an honor to be introduced to Rich Hilleman, Vice President and Chief Creative Officer, and to Dan Driscoll, Associate designer. We will be working with Dan a lot this semester.
Dan’s first task for us was to try out the Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator, a connected cooperative multi-screen experience. He arranged for us to train on the simulator each day this week in order to familiarize ourselves with a multi-screen experience and build a shared vocabulary for designing one of our own – not to mention, it’s a lot of fun.
It’s not all fun and games though. We’ve hit a few bumps in the first week while setting up access to EA’s resources, and our first deadline is very close: We are to pitch three game ideas to the OCCO next Tuesday. We got to work right away.
On Tuesday we started work on our team identity, selecting “BarrelEye” as a team name (it’s a kind of fish) and getting our group and team photos taken by Carl. On Wednesday we had started our logo design, and we met with Dan again and starting our brainstorming in earnest, filtering through dozens of ideas to find those that really fit our project goals – a connected, living room experience that will attract attention on a trade show floor.
By Thursday we were narrowing down our list of ideas and getting all our project organization set up. We had another long brainstorming session and attended a class where we watched Randy Pausch’s lecture on time management, a very timely reminder. We were also getting pretty good on the Artemis simulator by this time, and we were probably overconfident when we failed a mission for the first time!
Friday we finally got one computer set up with all the licenses and credentials needed to build the example game the OCCO provided to us. We also refined our brainstorming further and met with Jiyoung, Carl, and Dan to get their feedback on our game ideas. We finally got our list down to three and assigned weekend responsibilities so we can have the pitch ready to go on Tuesday. We didn’t expect to work through the first weekend, but the OCCO likes to move fast and it’s very exciting. We’re looking forward to an incredible semester!
