By now you would have guessed what the core highlight for this week was. Yes, the long awaited New York visit. This was also the week for the quarters so first an update on that before we get lost in the trip details.
Quarters Presentation
The team decided that it would be a good practice for having members of the team to present and but not include everyone since having 8 members present would become a little difficult with the frequent handovers. Lucien, Peter and Allison presented to the faculty and did a really good job at communicating the project’s agenda and also our concepts to the clients concisely. Some important questions asked by faculty members included like “what is the player’s motivation to play this game?”, “if players are scattered throughout the theater how will they communicate as a team?”, and so forth. We also wanted faculty members to provide details about where we can play test our games since its requires a large naive audience almost every time. Weekly films screened on main campus was one valuable suggestion as it simulates the same space as the G4C festival. For a complete breakdown of the faculty feedback, please refer to the doc here.
Proof of Concepts
Stephanie, Ben and Allison worked hard on getting some initial understanding on all the three concepts individually. Stephanie set up a local server getting a two way communication up and running between the client and the server. Ben worked out a working prototype for pitch recognition first within Unity then on a test Android device. Stephanie and Ben then worked together on porting this as a web service in purely JavaScript and/or HTML5. Allison meanwhile worked on getting an input stream from a webcam detected and analysed for detecting a red dot on the screen (using a laser pointer). This approach also was successful but we still need to test this system for scalability with our target audience numbers.
New York Trip
Friday morning the team departed for New York. We first had a walk through of the New World Stage were the festival will be organised. This included a tech run through of the place as well exploring on how all the possible concepts could be morphed to best fit the physical space. After lunch, we also visited G4C office and had a discussion with Ariel and Emily on the concepts. Clients liked all our ideas but narrowed down to the Virus concept (now called Boundaries) and the Friends concept. We also went into a lengthy discussion on how potentially Friends could be redesigned to solve a real issue at the festival, that is networking. Clients had some great feedback on how this potential idea could be revamped in order to allow attendees to network better at the festival with possible options of embedding technology within name tags, using RFID’s, color LEDs and such. This in turn could also be coupled with mobile technology to allow people to meet and initiate conversations with the category of people they would like to form connections with in a game-like fun and an engaging manner. For this concept, we are currently waiting on our clients to give us the complete parameters for the core concept. Once we have these, the team will look again at this with a fresh perspective going back to the drawing board. This would require spending more time on brainstorm thereby reducing some time from the development cycle but is worth a shot since our client is interested in this type of an approach.
Next..
The overall idea would be to brainstorm concepts for the new concept of “networking” meanwhile continue work on tech analysis of the Boundaries concept so as to get a bare-bone setup if eventually client and team mutually decide to go this way.
That’s it from Week 5. See you all next week and have a nice weekend.
Mayank Grover