March 16-20

Halves presentation today! This is a graded presentation where our team goes in front of faculty, friends and guests in the RPIS and shows what we’ve accomplished up to this point in production. We’re going to be doing a live demo and reading from chapter 2 of the story.

Team prepares for halves late Thursday night

What have we accomplished up to this point in production? Essentially, we’re halfway through. We’ve been doing about a chapter a week. This gives us three weeks to finish 4,5, and 6 before a content lock, where we spend the remaining three weeks polishing.

To be honest, it doesn’t feel like enough time. We’re going to have to push hard for our next sprint to keep to our pace implementing Chapter 4, but also adding revisions to Chapters 1-3 and conducting playtests. We have three playtests in the upcoming week.

We get to work with students in our age group! We’re working with Avonsworth Elementary, Lending Hearts, and using the ETC playtest that Mike Christel puts together. In each situation, we’re going to get groups of kids in rotations. During these playtests we’ll be doing two things: 1) watching students while they’re reading to see if it looks like they’re engaged with the book or if they’re distracted. 2) We’re going to conduct A/B testing – presenting an experience without augmentations and then the full experience with different groups, and surveying them after the fact on reading comprehension. We’d like to figure out if the “enhanced” experience changes the way students understand the story.

But man, where does the time go? There’s this whole chunk of time that cut right through our production: GDC, Spring Break, and now a week preparing for Halves/getting back into the flow.

On a positive note, we did get to demo Cat Scratch at GDC and got a huge chunk of feedback from expert game developers (a thinly veiled excuse to wear my cat ears). I was surprised by how much positive feedback we received. Our game is not really a game, and as we were presenting it at GDC (Game Developers Conference), I expected the response to be tempered. However! Universally, all our testers were excited about the artistic space we’re exploring.

GDC Demo