Week 14

In keeping with our equine metaphors, we have entered turn 4. Soft Opening marked the beginning of our final stretch of this project semester. This is where the pros separate themselves from the amateurs, the cream rises to the top and lots of other sports cliches pop up. We have put a lot of work in to making this experience (see Blogs 1-13) and now is when all of that truly gets tested. 

Like I mentioned in Blog 13, we were very happy with where Pegasus was at as an experience, but we still had some questions that we hoped the faculty could help shed some light on. They did not disappoint.

We figured out more of a sweet spot rein length based on various human factors (height, arm length, etc) and chair factors (pitch and speed). Many of the faculty understood the difference between the “claim a ring” sound and the “ring stolen” sound and reacted accordingly within the game. Instructions seemed to make sense, just took time for guests to get used to control scheme (added benefit of people playing before and giving them a pre-experience instruction set as well). No one asked to see the other scores, but they all immediately asked about scores as soon as they finished (played into our new exit screen).

So, we have some more answers… which is nice. The faculty also brought up some little things to look at like turning radius and speed, more elements of physical feedback and stabilization, relationship metric and explanation and more. Thankfully, most of it was based on small tweaks that could be made in a couple of days to just fine-tune the experience without adjusting its core. At the end of each playlets, though, they all complimented us on how far we have come and they believed that we accomplished a lot of the stuff we said that we set out to do at Halves.

All of that feedback, and a quick film session for our promotional trailer, earned the team a nice lunch out to celebrate and reflect on our semester. Being in a sentimental pre-Thanksgiving mood, too, it gave us the chance to talk about how much we enjoyed our team and how close we had gotten over the semester. It’s been a pleasure to be a part of this team and watch each person develop as the game developed too.

With all of that said…. We still have some more work to do. With the ETC equivalent of the Super Bowl coming up in less than a week, we will be making some slight adjustments to Pegasus as well as theming out our two project rooms to make them guest ready. Lots of code + lots of cardboard = lots of fun. We’ve been talking about Festival since our very first week and now we get the chance to make it happen.

Let’s go.