Week 8

We are now officially halfway through the semester. Because of this milestone, we had the opportunity to explain what we spent the first half of the semester doing to our classmates, faculty and other guests at “Halves” presentations.

We got to introduce people to our team and our chairs. We got to explain how we explored and discovered what made our chairs unique in the landscape of entertainment chairs. We got to talk through our decision making processes for brainstorming sessions, audience selection, and prototype development. We got to discuss how important playtesting was to our semester and how it has shaped our path. We got to unveil our three prototype pitches. We got to answer questions that people had about what we have done, where we are, and what we are doing next.

In addition to presenting all of this information to those at the ETC, we also sent this same information, as well as more thorough playtest logs, design documentation and demo builds to our clients so they could help us decide which prototype we would spend the rest of the semester working through.

Now? We wait… at least for a little bit, until our client has the chance to go through our proposals so we can have a decision discussion.

But we are really bad at waiting.

We spent the second half of the week, post-presentation, “not waiting” by determining some of the general user stories of our three prototypes that we would begin working on if those particular prototypes were picked. For example:

• Pegasus
  • As a guest, I want to accurately keep track of my score and my competitor’s score.
  • As a guest, I want to interact with other guests in multiple, meaningful ways.
  • As a guest, I do not want to get motion sick.
• Robot
  • As a guest, I want more control over my rotation/input.
  • As a guest, I want to communicate more effectively with my teammate.
• Daredevil
  • As a guest, I want to do other things to sabotage the drivers.
  • As a develop, I want to calibrate the experience to guests of different heights quickly and effectively.

Another task of “not waiting” and as a direct result of some faculty playtesting and feedback, we wanted to determine a plan of action for attacking motion sickness that could potentially plague any of our prototypes. We have been researching and working to implement various non-intrusive ways to allay motion sickness as well as objective ways to measure their impact in our experience and beyond.

Hopefully, early next week, we will have some sense of direction as to what to actually produce and polish in the next eight weeks, but until then we still have plenty of things to work on to lay the groundwork for whatever direction that is.