Week 5

Now that Q&A is over, we can get back to making more cool stuff.

This week (and weeks 6 and 7 as well, for that matter) was essentially split into two parts: finishing week-long prototype #1 and starting week-long prototype #2. One of those things was easy and one of those things was difficult.

The easier of the two tasks was finishing prototype #1 (that we still cannot really talk about yet). After spending the final few days of last week making each sub-team’s individual components of the experience, we spent the days this week integrating them and pulling them all together to complete the experience to the point where we could playtest it with other people to answer specific questions about why it was good, bad, or ugly. We got to do some light, unstructured and impromptu playtesting on the prototype on Tuesday and Wednesday and got extremely positive results.

Which is good and bad. 

Good? Internal monologue: Yay! People liked out stuff! (obviously, yes)

Bad? Internal monologue: Wait, should we just stick with this and not make any of the other week-long prototypes? (less obviously, no)

While we really liked the way prototype #1 turned out, we decided that we needed to attempt to make a second week-long prototype for a couple of different reasons:

• Show discipline that we can stick to our original plan
• Venture into new spaces and try to test new functionalities/stories
• Pivot and show off that we are more than one-trick-ponies
• Give ourselves some more time to think about how we could improve prototype #1 in other contexts

Enter: starting prototype #2 being really hard. We spent close to 36 hours debating and circling different ideas about what to do next. We all agreed that we wanted to test different game mechanisms and chair capabilities with this prototype, but we could not come up with a singular core fantasy to start from. After various brainstorming sessions at various places on campus, one idea finally led to another and before we knew it, we were acting out potential game ideas in our project room and really making headway. These exercises finally led us to our starting point which allowed us to spend the last few days of this week divvying up tasks, defining scope and planning our next week so we can finish this prototype by the middle of week 6.

We kept on good pace during this last week and proved to ourselves and other people around the ETC that we can make something test-able, and more importantly really fun, in a week that provides real value in determining whether or not this could be our final project.

Spirits are flying high (*wink*) in the project room and on the chairs thanks to prototype #1, so check back this week to see if we can serve up (*wink*) the same kind of results with prototype #2.