Video Update #1
By Brad Buchanan On
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!
The BarrelEye Team (clockwise from left): Romain Deciron, Neerav Mehta, Brian Lee, Brad Buchanan, Jaewan Park, Eren Song, Haewon Nam.
Hello from BarrelEye! We are a team of seven Carnegie Mellon students working with Electronic Arts to create a connected living room experience utilizing Smart TV technology. We are thrilled to be working with the Office of the Chief Creative Officer at EA this semester, and we’re looking forward to building a new and different experience with their assistance. We hit the ground running on our first day. After an orientation to the Silicon Valley campus and assembling our workspace we walked into a boardroom with the EA team and learned about our task for the semester. They’ve given us an intense production schedule that will begin with some rapid prototyping on the technology and research on related experiences. It was an honor to be introduced to Rich Hilleman, Vice President and Chief Creative Officer, and to Dan Driscoll, Associate designer. We will be working with Dan a lot this semester.
Dan’s first task for us was to try out the Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator, a connected cooperative multi-screen experience. He arranged for us to train on the simulator each day this week in order to familiarize ourselves with a multi-screen experience and build a shared vocabulary for designing one of our own – not to mention, it’s a lot of fun.
It’s not all fun and games though. We’ve hit a few bumps in the first week while setting up access to EA’s resources, and our first deadline is very close: We are to pitch three game ideas to the OCCO next Tuesday. We got to work right away.
On Tuesday we started work on our team identity, selecting “BarrelEye” as a team name (it’s a kind of fish) and getting our group and team photos taken by Carl. On Wednesday we had started our logo design, and we met with Dan again and starting our brainstorming in earnest, filtering through dozens of ideas to find those that really fit our project goals – a connected, living room experience that will attract attention on a trade show floor.
By Thursday we were narrowing down our list of ideas and getting all our project organization set up. We had another long brainstorming session and attended a class where we watched Randy Pausch’s lecture on time management, a very timely reminder. We were also getting pretty good on the Artemis simulator by this time, and we were probably overconfident when we failed a mission for the first time!
Friday we finally got one computer set up with all the licenses and credentials needed to build the example game the OCCO provided to us. We also refined our brainstorming further and met with Jiyoung, Carl, and Dan to get their feedback on our game ideas. We finally got our list down to three and assigned weekend responsibilities so we can have the pitch ready to go on Tuesday. We didn’t expect to work through the first weekend, but the OCCO likes to move fast and it’s very exciting. We’re looking forward to an incredible semester!
