WEEK 4:
Production:
The past week was spent researching our target demographic, meeting with industry experts (educators and teachers from high school participating in the NRL program), prototyping, finalizing branding, getting faculty input, locking design, and planning for each sprint through the remainder of the semester. Additionally, I spent some time populating the project backlog and ranking priorities based on the design we have been developing.
Programming:
In this week, we are making prototype based on ARkit2. At first, we have a lot of problems about setting up build environment. Because ARKit2 was just released on June and even the Unity official website doesn’t have a final plugin or package, we suffered a lot from its frequent update. However, the good news is when we finally worked it out, we will satisfied with the stability of ARKit2 and it seems we can do more on it.
In this prototype, we focus on making our “bot” move around in the real world. We use two analog sticks to control our bots. The left one is to control weather move forward or backward. THe right one is to turn left/right. We made a arena in our project room using some black tapes. We ask others try to move the bots following tracks and almost everyone can do that.
Design:
For week 4, it was necessary to get ready for our meeting with the school kids from the Cornell School District. As a preparation for that, we created a set of questions to ask based on a video we showed them about Bot building. The package created for focus testing was as follows:
6th and 7th Graders Package
- What do you and your friends like to do in your free time?
- Do you play games?
- If yes, when do u play games?
- If yes, what do you generally play on? PC? Ipad? IPhone?
- If not, what do you generally like doing after getting home? Are you new to games?
- What kind of games do you (and your friends) like to play?
- What classes do they find fun at school?
Video
Show them Combat video.
Show them Building video.
- Raise your hand when you see something you like.
- What parts of the video did you find exciting?
Post Video
- What parts of building the robot looked exciting?
BASIC LAYOUT:
- Open with the battle bots video.
- Separate into two groups
- Ask questions: What parts of the video did you find exciting?
- Raise your hand when you see something you like. Show them the second video.
- Ask questions: What parts of the video did you find exciting?
- Ask general questions.
We got pretty good information for the things we were specifically looking for and also ended having information we weren’t quite expecting.
One of the most important things that we learned from the visit was that students were very much excited about the building process and not just the battling part of the competition. We realised that students liked building a bot that solves a specific problem and it we understood how important problem solving would be as a part of our game.
We also had industry experts visit us during the same week. After showing them what AR could do, they seemed really enthusiastic about the technology we were working with and were giving us tons of ideas on what part of the Bot building process would be enhanced by AR.
Art:
In week 3 and week 4, we focus on settling down our rough finial design. We set our game flow into building and testing in different levels. We will let our players known how to combine several components in the right place in a bot and test the bot.
In addition, in the art side, we made some 3D models of the components of the battlebots for future development like the wheels, motors and batteries. For the next step, we will put these assets into our prototype for testing. And we will make a entire bot in 3D model for driving prototype.
UX/UI Design:
This week is really intense. During the last faculty meeting, Mike and John expressed their concern for our quarter. We did spend lots of time trying to nail down our design and did not have too much prototype to show at that moment. So our major work in this week is trying to do some hands-on work, After last faculty meeting, we finally nail down our design solution. To meet with two main stakeholders’ need, we divided the whole experience into two parts, including building and testing parts.
On Thursday, we went to Cornell middle school to have our target audience research. We had two sessions with both 7th and 8th grade. The kids had lots of valuable input based on our project.
On Friday, we were glad to have our experts from the program. The experts offered lots of important insights for us. For example, the question which faculty always asked us, ‘Why AR?’
The design plan on blueprint looks thin and abstract. If we could create the 3D components in AR world which could compared with realty stuff, it would be really helpful for kids have a better feeling of the specific components they have designed in the design process.