For the third week, our goal was to finalize a game design and develop a few prototypes to test out different features of the game we would finally build. After multiple meetings and discussions, the second idea from last week transformed into an underwater experience. There would be good and bad sea creatures – good creatures would just swim around in the space, while bad creatures would try and find ways to eliminate the good creatures. This may be by trying to empty out the water, or eliminate them one by one, we weren’t sure. We set up a meeting with Jesse Schell and pitched him this idea, along with the pinball idea from last week. Jesse was not very optimistic about the capabilities of the Tango and was skeptical of how well our ideas suited the Tango. Specifically, he was concerned about the fact that the Tango’s real selling point is it’s depth sensing and by itself, is not the best VR headset, so a game built for it must really leverage its strengths and be more than what can be built for, say, an oculus Rift. He gave us a few suggestions on how to approach such a problem and told us what he usually does when faced with similar problems. Carl gave us his inputs on the matter too.
We then went back to the drawing board and brainstormed some more, keeping Jesse and Carl’s suggestions in mind. We increased our focus on interesting interactions rather than the theme, and came back with a few interesting ideas. We built a quick prototype to detect the user’s hand. This worked far better than we originally expected and we realised that it might actually be possible to integrate this into one of our games to provide pretty intuitive interactions. Another thing we tried was to have the user sit in a wheelchair and have someone else move them around. This proved to be a very fun experience for the person in the wheelchair and seems like another potentially fun interaction we could have in our game.
While all these design discussions have been going on, we have made it a point to keep churning out new prototypes to keep exploring what the Tango is good at and what it isn’t, and have been learning a lot along the way.
It’s been a fairly tough week since though we wanted to finalize a game and start development, we have had to slow down and reconsider the design through different lenses and ensure we are not overestimating the capabilities of the Tango or underutilizing its unique sensors. Still, we have been making good progress in understanding it better and are getting close to a solid overall design.