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.