This week the CuriouSer team focused on improving our MVP to better represent the final design goals and to address the feedback we got last week. We also play tested the new experience at Union Area Highschool. Design had to address most of these changes by changing the design of key features. This included changing the cook-o-matic from more direct programming to recreating steps done in manual cooking. This was also the first test where we had the order systems planned out to meet the learning goals. Students seemed to react well to the changes and got our learning goals at a high level.

Programming and art had to work to change the automatic cooking to match the new design. For art, this meant creating new cook-o-matic assets to represent what the new style of cooking is doing. This came in the form of machines that had openings you could place your made pizzas. For programming, this meant changing how we are handling automatic cooking to use the premade assets rather than then step style programming we had. This allowed us to better tie what a student is doing to what the machine is doing so they can understand the benefits.

Sound finished the first version of our tutorial and VO. This helps the player to get comfortable in the environment and understand what interactions are possible. It also introduces the players to the cook-o-matic and gets them to use it. We noticed that having that moment of introduction had a huge impact on how many players used the cook-o-matic.

One other change we made to the design was the introduction of a second oven. This oven would allow you to freeze a pizza rather than cook it. This gave us a simple way to expand the number of recipes while only needing small changes. For programming, this meant adding minimal tracking to the pizza to know if it’s hot or cold. For art, this meant just adding an extra layer to indicate if the pizza is frozen or not.