Quarters week! Before that though, we had a very special guest join us for the day – Anthony Daniels. The voice of C3PO, like he makes sure to do every semester, spent some time with both the teams here at EA and gave us valuable feedback on what was working and what wasn’t. After an entertaining talk by him during the All-hands meeting, he came around to our project space and tried out the demos. He absolutely loved our work! There’s nothing more encouraging than a celebrity like him telling us that he sees huge potential in the work that we were doing and asking us not to slow down! He spent a good amount of time trying out our prototypes giving us suggestions. Tuesday was spent polishing up the prototypes and getting a few last features in. We went into quarters with the same three prototypes that we had discussed last week.
Quarters
Quarters was an absolute blast. We had about 20 employees of EA stop by our office space and try the games out. We demoed the three prototypes simultaneously in different spaces of the office and were able to get everyone to try them out. Everyone who tried it out absolutely loved the experience. We were quite surprised by how comfortable people got with the device on. They were walking and touching objects within a minute or two of wearing it for the first time. Oh and we had a delicious catered lunch too. All in all, it was a great day. We got some valuable feedback from a considerable number of guests and it was clear that they people liked what we were building.
After quarters, we gathered the team and had a quick meeting with regard to how we should proceed from there. It was nice that we had tried three different prototypes for quarters, because we were able to learn a lot about what worked and what didn’t. For example, we assumed that navigation was going to be very difficult, and so built the horror game prototype where the person sat down on a chair and someone else wheeled them around. However, after the playtesting, we realized that people actually didn’t have much of a problem walking around in the space. Some of them even wanted to get up out of the wheelchair and walk around to explore the space. However, It didn’t make sense to keep developing all three prototypes further, so we decided we were going to cut two of them and focus on just one for the next 10 weeks. Since we had made the most headway in our biome game, we decided to have that as our base and build up on it. We are now working to integrate all the desirable features from the other two prototypes into the biome game. We are still in the process of assimilating all the feedback from the playtests and writing it all down.
Quarters provide a great checkpoint for teams to pause and evaluate their work with naive guests. Going into week 4, we knew we had a lot of work to do in order to get ourselves into a good position for quarters. Now, at the end of week 5, we feel like we were successful in doing that and were able to get everything together in time for the showcase. We are excited to keep pushing this technology and see what 10 more weeks of experimentation and development will take us.
