BarrelEye strikes again! Our momentum continues unabated in a second week that feels like an extension of the first. In our last update, we mentioned that we were preparing a pitch for the Office of the Chief Creative Officer here at Electronic Arts. We worked through the weekend preparing design documents and concept art for our presentation. Somehow we also found time to get two sample applications up and running on the TV.
On Tuesday morning we rehearsed our pitch for our advisors. For the rest of the day we were finding time between classes to revise our pitch and improve our slides. The art team did an incredible job adding a layer of polish to our ideas, so that by the time we gave our pitch that evening everything looked great. We gave our pitch to Rich Hilleman, Dan Driscoll and Ben Medler (who will also work with us moving forward). They were pleased with our work and enthusiastic about all of our ideas, but they quickly selected one as their favorite – a cooperative dungeon crawl experience we call Torch.
Torch is all about gathering some friends and getting lost in your own living room. It is a connected experience for a Smart TV and a group of Android phones. Players explore a dungeon in first-person view on their phones, lighting torches to reveal a map view on the TV. The team felt this idea was best suited for CES in January because it could be a drop-in experience for one or more players, and because it didn’t need a lot of explanation. We agree, and are thrilled to be working on Torch.
The OCCO asked us to record a video version of our pitch, featuring Torch as our favorite idea. We spent Wednesday completing that video, with a short break to meet with our advisors and Anthony Daniels, who visited our campus this week. Seeing that we were quite busy they offered encouragement and quickly sent us back to work!
At the end of the week we could finally take a deep breath and look at our plan for the rest of the semester. We modified the Smart TV demos we ran earlier and made them take input from the TV remote. We assigned team roles and organized our backlog so we can work efficiently moving forward. Ben even set up a meeting with some resources across EA that are going to help us out this semester.
Next week on Wednesday we are presenting a more detailed design and a prototyping and playtesting plan to Mr. Hilleman. We hope to have our first playtest (on our core loop) before quarter presentations, and we are supposed to hit alpha by mid-semseter. It’s a tight schedule, but we’re up to the challenge. See you next week!
