Week 15: Finals
We had a great time at the Games for Change Festival last week! We had a great time at the festival and learned so much. Our game ran relatively smoothly and players seemed to really enjoy our game!
This week has been spent assessing the results from running our game at the Festival. We have also spent a significant amount of time reworking our game website and putting footage from New York into our promotional videos. This week, we began preparing for our final presentation here at the ETC, which will be occurring next week.
We are excited to show off all our hard work!
Week 14: New York City and the Games for Change Festival
This week we headed out to New York to make our final calibrations and have the game be played live at the Games for Change Festival.
We arrived in New York on Monday, before the Festival began, to test our final build and calibrate to Washington Square Park. We spent a lot of time in the NYU library to put the finishing touches on our game. Janet, Lisa, and Tim took this time to boost our social media and try to create some buzz about our game before Thursday. The Festival began on Tuesday, and we continued to test and make sure that everything was in its place. We got to attend a few of the talks at the conference and meet some really interesting people. We spent some of the time at the festival meeting people and trying to recruit players for our game on Thursday. Wednesday we attended the Come Out and Play games, which also focus on outdoor games. Despite the wind, we had a lot of fun playing those games and meeting other outdoor game developers. Jesse and Drew made special announcements during their talks to promote our game, for which we are eternally grateful. Wednesday night, we made sure to go to bed early so that we could get up early and be ready for our game’s debut.
On Thursday morning we woke up bright and early and arrived at Washington Square Park at 8:30. It was a clear day, albeit a little chilly, but we were confident that the game would be successful. With our brightly colored balloons, we were prepared for the players to join us in the park. Though we did not have over 200 players, we did average about 15 players per session, which ended up being around 60 players overall. The players seemed excited about our game and were eager to give us feedback at the end. Here is a video from the game being played in Washington Square Park:
On Friday we came back to Pittsburgh and took the weekend off. Next week, we plan to assess the results from the festival and prepare that information to be used in our final presentation.
Week 13: Softs and Final Preparations
On Saturday, we ran our game at Carnival, the spring festival on Carnegie Mellon’s main campus. Our intentions with this playtest were to run the game with a large number of people, test the scaling of our game, and to test the flow of gathering and organizing a large group of people before our game. Unfortunately, we did not have as many players as we were hoping to have, but we still learned some valuable lessons. With the result of the playtest in mind, we met on Sunday to discuss what needed to be tweaked and what else needed to be implemented into the game. The biggest takeaway from Carnival was that we really needed to focus on advertising and promoting our game to get enough players to play.
Since the Games for Change festival is happening earlier than Soft Openings and Final Presentations at the ETC, we had our Soft Openings with the faculty on Monday. We used the footage that we took from our playtest at Carnival and presented our game to the Faculty. They gave us good feedback and advised us to hold another playtest with more players. They advised us to really focus on promoting our game during the festival to ensure that we had players come and play our game. They also advised that we be sure to give players an opportunity to take action outside of our game.
After Softs, our team was busy with final preparations and final tweaks to the game. Minor changes to art and sound assets needed to be implemented as well as website features for before and after the game. We also set to work making promotional materials such as an instructional card for the Games for Change program and T-shirts for us to wear in the park so that players can find us. Our producers were very busy finalizing all the plans for the festival. We also decided to have one last playtest before we left for New York with as many players as possible.
On Friday we held our last playtest at the ETC. We had about 50 players and ran the game twice. We found that our scaling was off and that players could finish the game too easily. We found a couple issues with certain browsers, but overall the test went well. We continued to work after the playtest and made some final changes to our post-game survey.
Next week is the Games for Change Festival. We are taking an overnight Greyhound on Sunday to get to New York City on Monday. We will spend Monday calibrating our game for Washington Square Park and making any other necessary changes. Then we will spend the rest of the festival promoting our game before it runs on Thursday morning April 24th, from 9:00-11:30 am. We cannot wait to run our game and show off all of our hard work!
Week 12: Testing, Testing, Testing
User Playtest day at the ETC occurred on Saturday. Despite the nice weather we had had earlier in the week. It rained all day on Friday and by Saturday, it was cold, windy, and all the ground was muddy and slippery. Since we had playtesters that were older, we did not want to risk anyone’s safety, so we decided to recalibrate our game for the top of the parking deck. The top floor of the parking deck was open and a large enough space for people to play in. However, as we discovered while we were calibrating, it was excessively windy up there making the cold air unbearable. After all this, we decided it was better for us to not run our game on Saturday, but rather run it later in the week when it would be warmer and sunnier.
Monday started with a conference call with our clients at Games for Change. We discussed ways to improve our game as well as ways to garner attention at the Games for Change Festival to ensure that we have enough players. After this, we booked our tickets to New York and began planning how our game would run in Washington Square Park and what kind of promotional materials we would need to prepare.
Following the weekend, the weather forecast said that Thursday would be warm and sunny, so we decided to run our next playtest then. We spent the early part of the week preparing for this test. We made some minor changes to the game’s mechanics and prepared a survey for after the test. On Thursday we had around 30 players, including students and faculty, and ran our game twice. Though we did run into some problems with people’s phones not working, overall it ran smoothly. Immediately following, we met with our advisors to discuss the results.
Simultaneously, we were making the final preparations for our Soft Opening/Final playtest, which would be occurring the coming weekend on Carnegie Mellon’s main campus as part of the Carnival festivities. We made promotional posters that we posted all over main campus as well as around the ETC. We also took the results from our playtest on Thursday and implemented changes as quickly as we could to ensure that the Carnival test would be a meaningful learning experience. We spent most of Friday implementing changes and fixing bugs. Friday night, the team went outside and tested the final build before Carnival.
This weekend, we plan to run our game at Carnival and will hopefully receive great insight and feedback. We will then begin preparing for our Faculty Soft presentations, which will be occurring on Monday. Next week is the last week before the festival, so we will be very busy making all the final preparations before the Games for Change festival. We cannot wait to showcase all the hard work we have done this semester!
Week 11: New York and Testing pt. 2
Over the weekend we took a quick weekend trip to New York to test our current build in the actual space of Washington Square Park. We also had a few other questions we needed to answer and assets we needed to test. The trip proved to be very useful as it informed us about how people would move in the space and what we needed to change to accommodate that. It also became clear that we needed to change the main map a bit so that it was easier to know where you were in both the physical and virtual space. Since it rained the entire time we were in New York, another important thing we figured out was that our game can in fact be played in the rain.
The weekend trip was extremely useful and we came in on Monday ready to work hard. Based on what we learned about the space and the map, we knew we had to make some changes on the art side. So Jack began to overhaul the map and the icons. We were able to adjust tech parameters on the fly while there, but we also had to make the final changes once we got back. We also began work on redesigning and implementing the remaining events.
This coming Saturday is the User Playtest Day that is being held at the ETC. We wanted to get as much into the game as we could before Saturday so that we could test as much as possible. With that in mind, we worked hard as a team to create and build the remaining events and create an introduction for our game. The introduction sets the tone of our game and informs the player of their role within the game. We wanted to make a statement at the beginning about hunger and then ease the player into the game.
On Friday, it was all hands on deck to finish preparing for the User Playtest Day. We implemented all the new art and sound assets into the build and began writing the survey for the playtesters to fill out after the game.
Next week, we plan to finish implementing all the features into our game and use the information from the playtest to tweak our game. We are planning on running our game up on main campus as a part of the CMU Carnival. This is substituting as our Soft Opening as it will be the only time before the festival that we will be able to run it with a large group of people. Then we will have one week to make the finishing touches before we head off to New York again for the Games for Change Festival!
Week 10: Halves
After a great week at GDC, team URSA reconvened and began preparations for our Halves presentations in which we present to the faculty the current status of our project.
We spent the first few days of the week rehearsing and focusing our presentation to explain our process and our project as clearly as possible. After much preparation, we felt ready to present on Wednesday. The presentation went well, and we received excellent questions from the faculty about how our game would resonate with the players and how we would ensure that they took away the correct message.
Following Halves, we met to discuss the feedback we received and what our next steps were. We took a hard look at the schedule and made certain our next steps were within scope. We also had discussions about the clarity of our game in its current state and how we could make it better. We then spent time preparing for our immediate next step, which is visiting Washington Square Park in New York City and testing the game within the space.
On Friday, the team met to conceive new event interactions and made final preparations for New York City. We are taking an overnight Greyhound bus and will arrive in the city on Saturday morning. Once there, we plan to test the accuracy of our GPS system within the park, the placement of the various zones, and the flow of the gameplay within the space. We plan to also test whether or not we will need physical markers that correspond to the virtual zones, and test the ambient noise in the park to assess how much sound can be heard while playing the game.
Next week, we plan to run a quick paper playtest regarding whether or not the art assets are portraying the correct tone and provide the users with a clear understanding of what is occurring in the game. We will also be preparing for the User Test day that Janice is organizing and will use this day to test our game with a larger group of players.
Week 9: Playtest 1 / Spring Break
Hello! This week we ran our first official playtest and continued to develop our project.
Monday was a big day for us. We were all very busy preparing for our first playtest with naive guests. We ran two playtests with ten participants in each test. We filmed the playtests and had the participants fill out a survey at the end of their test. Here is some of the footage that we captured from the test:
We learned a lot from our playtests. Most importantly, we learned that most people thought that our game was fun, but unfortunately we also learned that few fully understood what it was about. We had anticipated both of these facts, but it was good to confirm them through external objective testers.
Next week is the Game Developer’s Conference and half of our team will be attending, so we continued to push through Spring Break to get as much done as we could. The feedback from our playtest was great, and from that feedback we knew what we needed to do next. We finalized the basic story for the game, and Jack began theming our User Interface. The tech team began adjusting the back-end of our build to be adaptable for the events that occur in the story of our game.
We have also started preparing for our Halves Presentations. With this playtest under our belt, we felt that we were ready to begin creating our presentation. Everyone added their part, and once we get back from GDC, we will begin practicing the presentation as well.
Next week, while half of the team is at GDC, the rest of the team will continue to implement and test the story and events in our game. We look forward to this next wave of feedback and testing.
Week 8: Testing pt. 1
This week, we focused our efforts on preparing for our first official playtest.
We started the week with a conference call with Greg Trefry from Come Out and Play Festival, which is a large outdoor game festival that occurs in New York and San Francisco every year. He gave us some very helpful insight into running a live game with a large number of people outside in New York City.
Our tech team focused their efforts applying GPS functions to our game. The first thing we wanted to test was whether the game could tell when you were in one location versus another. There was much testing. Ken and Alex were constantly running outside in the cold to test.
On Wednesday, we tested this first iteration as a team The test included only one location mapped by GPS. We tested to see if the other phones could recognize and respond to the location we set. After this test, the tech team began working to implement more GPS locations, and also began positioning them to real world locations outside of our building. They also created a GPS accuracy test, which we sent to Tim’s friend in New York City. She and another person walked around Washington Square Park and the test recorded their accuracy. There were two phones used in the accuracy test, an iPhone 4S and a Samsung Galaxy SIII. We discovered that the Samsung Galaxy’s GPS is far less accurate than the iPhone. Using the information gathered from this test, the tech team could more accurately position the GPS markers so that they not interfere with each other.
At the same time, Jack was creating the assets for our first iteration of the User Interface. After our first iteration test, we made some changes to the User Interface. Jack then dove in to create new assets for the next playtest. The research team continued to do more research into the issue as well as researching the emotional tone of other games about social issues.They met later in the week to discuss their findings. They created a list of events and obstacles to be included in the game based on the research they had done.
After our client meeting on Friday, we are pushing hard through the weekend to have a playable prototype. We are planning on having a playtest on Monday, outside of the ETC. We also plan to start preparations for Halves Presentations next week.
Week 7: Initializing
Week 7: Initializing
Having received the green light from our client and our advisors, we hit the ground running this week and started crafting our game.
On Monday, we created the first rough digital prototype of our game in Unity. We used this as a guide for our development team. Our programmers then did some research of Node.js to figure out the best way to create this same experience in HTML5 and for multiple users to play at once. By Thursday, we had another prototype that allowed multiple players to access and play the prototype from different computers. This proved to be a success and as a team, we also found it to be entertaining to play!
Once we had our first tech prototype, our team began working on our product backlog to help us figure out what we wanted to include in this game and to prioritize our tasks to make for the most efficient production schedule. Jack began working on some concept art for the game, specifically the User Interface. Tim, Lisa, and Janet continued to research the social issue in more depth so as to obtain some hard numbers and data that we could build our game around.
On Friday we met with our faculty advisors and later our client, and we showed both of them the prototype that we created. Overall they seemed pleased and provided us with some helpful feedback to guide us along in the process.
Next week we plan to create another prototype that includes some art assets. We will also be testing the GPS and potentially other positioning/tracking technologies. We are hoping to conduct a small playtest at the end of the week.
Week 6: Clear Path
Hello friends! This week was a very productive week for Team URSA. Following Quarters and our last client meeting, we dug deep and pushed ourselves to create a solid game concept that we were all excited about and that also met the needs of the client.
Having chosen world hunger as central focus of our game, we focused all of our efforts this week on refining and defining the specific message about world hunger that we wanted to send to the players. We came up with a few core statements about hunger and then designed game concepts that were inspired by these statements.
Following the advice gleaned from many meetings with various faculty members, we decided that the best design for a game for over 100 people to play outdoors would have to be simple and straightforward. We met numerous times to iron out the details in our concept and to ensure that our message was clearly present in every element of our design. The concepts that came from these meetings were simple and clear and we were ready to pitch them to our client.
Finally on Friday, we presented our game concepts to our advisors and our client. The ideas were received well and we were given the green light to go ahead with production. We as a team met and chose our favorite idea and then celebrated with some Bubble Tea! Balancing the needs of the client, the faculty, and the team has been a difficult task, but it has been a rewarding process so far.
We also had process reviews with our team advisors this week. Process reviews give us the opportunity to reflect on our self-assessment that we each completed at the beginning of the semester. It also gives our advisors the opportunity to give us individual feedback.
Next week we will dive head first into production and begin prototyping the core of our game mechanic. We are excited to see what the next few weeks will hold for us.