Production:
The week was spent on further research, fleshing out our design, and agile SCRUM, burndown charts, Trello, and the project backlog. We conducted research on previous existing games in the area, put together a list of questions for our survey with our target demographic (next week). Additionally, the design team has settled on a basic structure for the structure of our experience, consisting of periods of building and designing followed by battle sequences in AR. Next week we will be meeting our target demographic (middle schoolers) at a local southwestern PA school in order to learn more about them and their interests.
Programming:
In this week, we did researches on what we can do with the AR and found some tech demo provided by Unity. We are setting up the environment for AR development. Including the package for Unity, the mac build environment. We have some problems at first when we tried to build some examples on iPad and later we realized that only the new ipad supports AR, those old ones are not capable to run AR apps. Thus we found out all the devices that support ARKit2 and made a request for them.
We have some discussion on how to use those AR technique to enrich our gameplay or make it more fun. One of the ideas I came up with was using the scanning feature in the new ARKit 2 to scan the shape drawn by kids and let them extrude and adjust the scale. It’s more like a simplified metaphor of the real building process. But it also have other problems like the shape should be simple enough which means usually may meaningless to the final bots. At last, we think let the AR scan a image and pop a preset component would be a better choice for us.
Design:
For week three, we started focusing more on different kind of applications that exist in AR and what mechanics can we use as an inspiration for our game. We found couple of good games on the app store and started playing around with them. We made a list of some of the good decisions that they had made and some not so good decisions that we should avoid. By the end of the week, we were able to finalise an idea for the game that was based on an iterative development learning approach.
UI/UX Design:
In this week, I focus on research on existing AR work in App Store. I try to get some inspiration from them about the interaction in AR world. The designers in team brainstormed out with several ideas and try to nail down a concrete idea through pulling back and forth.
For branding, I finish our logo and poster. After getting critique from John and Ricardo, I have my second iteration.
This is the first iteration of our idea. We have divided the game into two phases, building and testing. While the team is confident about having the testing part implemented in AR, we are still trying to get to make a decision about whether the building part of our game would be in AR or on the IPad.