Concept art © Brian Lee.
From the monthly archives: "September 2012"
Team BarrelEye testing our paper prototype.
Some weeks, it feels like you spend more time talking about your game than building it. Team BarrelEye experienced that feeling this week as we prepared a design presentation hot on the heels of our pitch. Everybody has a hand in preparing our presentations, which takes time – we hope to use the slides we have created to quickly template future presentations.
Monday was full of planning. Our engineers met to discuss the game’s architecture, consider the challenges we are most likely to encounter down the road, and prepare a list of tasks they need to complete over the next two weeks. There were also a couple of design meetings to clarify details that we had to include in our Wednesday presentation. Over lunch we shared some of our experiences so far with West-Turn and agreed to meet later to share playtest results. We also had individual advisor meetings and, bit-by-bit, performed our first Scrum pulldown to begin our first official sprint. Tuesday and Wednesday flew by as art and production prepared for the presentation, and engineering started a prototype.
Wednesday afternoon we presented to eight members of the OCCO team, along with our advisors. We shared our research, describing a few of the games we are drawing from. We gave a more complete overview of our design, specifically focusing on the core game loop to find the fun as soon as possible. Finally, we presented our playtesting plan for the next two weeks. Our goal is to test a paper prototype on Friday of this week, and to begin a Unity prototype that will be networked for internal testing on Tuesday. On Friday the 21st we will invite the other ETC teams to help us playtest that prototype, so that at Quarters on the 26th (also our next OCCO milestone) we can present playtesting results, a revised design, and a roadmap to alpha.
The OCCO team provided us with great feedback, and revealed some ways that they will guide us as we proceed with the project. They were very interested in how we can make the game work for a trade show setting, from making the TV screen attract attention, to designing a multiplayer game that can be demoed to a single guest. After our meeting we had smaller conversations that lent further insight into our design. We were also asked to turn this presentation into a video, and future presentations as well – we’ve found it’s a great tool to make our presentations clear and direct.
Jaewan controls the “TV” during our playtest.
On Thursday and Friday we were happy to spend time with John Dessler, who is visiting from Pittsburgh for a few days. He gave a workshop on brainstorming and the creative process, and also took time to sit down with our team and talk about our project. John helped us anticipate some of the hardest challenges we will come across this semester, both from a product perspective and from a teamwork perspective. Thanks John!
By the end of the week we finished our paper playtest and had an early prototype running on a phone, so we feel good about our current progress. We also had our short weekly update with Ben, and we continue to struggle with a few IT issues but for the most part it’s not slowing us down.
Even in a week of talking (and listening!) we’ve found that with good teamwork we can get work done. Better, we can learn to take advantage of valuable feedback from the talented people that surround us to make our game better than we originally imagined. Next week we have no major presentation so our focus will be on prototyping and playtesting, continuing to actively seek that feedback from our teachers, clients, and peers. Expect great things from team BarrelEye!
BarrelEye strikes again! Our momentum continues unabated in a second week that feels like an extension of the first. In our last update, we mentioned that we were preparing a pitch for the Office of the Chief Creative Officer here at Electronic Arts. We worked through the weekend preparing design documents and concept art for our presentation. Somehow we also found time to get two sample applications up and running on the TV.
On Tuesday morning we rehearsed our pitch for our advisors. For the rest of the day we were finding time between classes to revise our pitch and improve our slides. The art team did an incredible job adding a layer of polish to our ideas, so that by the time we gave our pitch that evening everything looked great. We gave our pitch to Rich Hilleman, Dan Driscoll and Ben Medler (who will also work with us moving forward). They were pleased with our work and enthusiastic about all of our ideas, but they quickly selected one as their favorite – a cooperative dungeon crawl experience we call Torch.
Torch is all about gathering some friends and getting lost in your own living room. It is a connected experience for a Smart TV and a group of Android phones. Players explore a dungeon in first-person view on their phones, lighting torches to reveal a map view on the TV. The team felt this idea was best suited for CES in January because it could be a drop-in experience for one or more players, and because it didn’t need a lot of explanation. We agree, and are thrilled to be working on Torch.
The OCCO asked us to record a video version of our pitch, featuring Torch as our favorite idea. We spent Wednesday completing that video, with a short break to meet with our advisors and Anthony Daniels, who visited our campus this week. Seeing that we were quite busy they offered encouragement and quickly sent us back to work!
At the end of the week we could finally take a deep breath and look at our plan for the rest of the semester. We modified the Smart TV demos we ran earlier and made them take input from the TV remote. We assigned team roles and organized our backlog so we can work efficiently moving forward. Ben even set up a meeting with some resources across EA that are going to help us out this semester.
Next week on Wednesday we are presenting a more detailed design and a prototyping and playtesting plan to Mr. Hilleman. We hope to have our first playtest (on our core loop) before quarter presentations, and we are supposed to hit alpha by mid-semseter. It’s a tight schedule, but we’re up to the challenge. See you next week!
