Month: October 2018

Production: 

We spent much of this week preparing for quarters walkarounds from the ETC faculty, integrating feedback, and iterating on our design. For walkarounds, each two/three faculty session was only 15 minutes, but we were able to introduce our topic, project goals, and get some valuable feedback on our AR prototype and the second major iteration of our design. We met with our client later on in the week to get his input on the new structure, which he was receptive of.

For the past two weeks, the team has shifted away from the physical SCRUM board to Trello to manage work and tasks accompanied by brief dailies and role specific meetings. I plan on adapting our backlog to our new design over the next week, and rescheduling the start of our first sprint for next Wednesday. My intention is that is that by maintaining the physical scrum board and simple burndown chart, the team will be able to easily visualize and interpret trends so that we can adjust our workflow for the next sprint cycle.

Design:

This week, we got a prototype out for testing our movement phase. The demo includes putting wheels on your bot and then placing it in physical space to drive it around. This demo was a sample of what our first idea would feel like in terms of switching between non-AR and AR part of our game. After trying it out with faculty during quarters, we got some really good feedback on our prototype. We were a little skeptical about driving a bot in AR because of the limitations of the IPad screen size but we found out that it didn’t feel all that uneasy and was actually pretty smooth to drive.

This week, we also started expanding on the battle part of our game to test our 2nd idea which has much more controlled gameplay. In Order to better scope, we have modified our idea in a way that we don’t have to actually teach kids how to build a bot from scratch. Based on the feedback we received during quarters, we have decided to divide the process into three parts with each part highlighting an aspect of bot building. The three aspects include Repair, Redesign and Strategy involved in bot building and battling.

A flowchart for the idea is as follows:

Based on our flowchart, we are going to expand each aspect and we are going to make the player experience a battle that will resemble a past championship battle.

Repair: Teaches the player about material replacement and durability.

Redesign: Includes presenting the player with a problem in the arena and providing a set of options amongst which the player will choose which one to pursue.

Strategy: Includes the strategy involved during an actual battle where none of the bots get defeated. Each bot will get points based on where they attack their opponent and a tally will decide who wins.

Programming:

This week we are making another prototype that combines two phases of our game: building and battling. For building part, we make tools in the non-ar environment. we move two wheels around and place them at the right place of both side. Once it’s done, we are able to drop the bots we were just created to the scene. Although it’s still a simple and rough version prototype but this at least give us the sense of the whole game flow.

One of the difficulties we encountered is the object that persist between two scenes. And since the object we created has rigid body, the unity physical system seems not stable at some points. We later fix the problem by adding constraint on two axis rotations. Though it’s not the perfect solution, we still have something that testable at last.

 

Art:

In this week, we changed our game design into a new one which will be focus more on Ar controlling and battle. In the new game flows, the players will choose a bot to battle and try to fix the broken parts of this bot during the battle. The players can learn how to place different components of a bot.

For the prototyping, we finished a rough whole bot with wheels and weapon for testing. In the prototype, we test controlling the bot in AR by using only one button to control the turning and moving forward. Next week, if the prototype works well and we will move forward for more 3D modeling as well as animations and texture.

 

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:

1. Open with the battle bots video.
2. Separate into two groups
3. Ask questions: What parts of the video did you find exciting?
4. Raise your hand when you see something you like. Show them the second video.
5. Ask questions: What parts of the video did you find exciting?
6. 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.

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.