Month: December 2017

This being a week before our final presentation, we made sure to finalize everything in our prototype in the beginning itself to get feedback from our advisors before handing over the project and documentation to our clients.

Other than that, we worked on the following this week:

• Creating a new build
• Updating website
• Promotional video
• Demo Video
• Post mortem report of our game
• Final Presentation
• Archive
• Client Handbook
• Polishing
• Project Hand off

CREATING A NEW BUILD:

For the new build, we focused on the following things:

• minor bug fixes
• client requirement

SHOWCASE: Our showcase went really well and everyone were really impressed by our project. One of the major feedbacks we got from the showcase was to polish the pedestrians in the environment.

CLIENT REQUIREMENTS:

• Customization tutorial: Our clients had requested for  a one on one session on how to customize few changes in our prototype. One of the programmers gave a brief tutorial to both the clients on how we implemented the features in our prototype.
• Documentation: We documented all the important points in our build.

NEW BUILD:

We fixed the behavior of pedestrians and traffic in the new build.

DEMO AND PROMOTIONAL VIDEOS:

We created a demo video from our final build to present it in our final presentation and also worked on the promotional video which has all the team member talking about their experience and role in the project building process. We also had the clients talk about their expectations, involvement and feedback as well.

Client Handbook:

We came up with a client’s handbook including all the details on how the project works. In our clients handbook we made sure to include every aspect of documentation (programming, UI/UX design, research, 3D art), User’s instruction manual (which explains our control scheme), user testing analysis.

POST MORTEM REPORT OF OUR PROJECT:

We worked on the post mortem report of our project wherein we included all the detailed explanation on our work flow from pre planning-research-project design-development-feedback-playtesting-revised iterations-project handoff.

FINAL PRESENTATION: 

Our final presentation included all the points that our director asked us to and also a demo of our game.

ARCHIVE, WEBSITE:

We moved all our work draft, final products to the archive and also made sure that the website is up to date

PROJECT HAND OVER: 

We handed over the working executable files and project files to RCI on 12/10/2017 and City of Pittsburgh clients on 12/12/2017. As a backup we are installing it on our instructor’s computer as well.

The week started by softs opening.

Softs Opening:

We got mostly positive feedback but were advised to talk only on what was required to.

Some of the feedback we got during softs:

-Give a Clear feedback when something in the environment is selected

-Sounds (The birds sounds are disturbing)

-There is bug when changing a building to park for the first time

 

-Thunder sound plays when exciting a menu

-Autonomous road option

We came up with a schedule after the softs opening:

We will be working on the following things for the next part of the week other than the documentation.

Programming

-Import all the buildings

-Autonomous road option

-Pedestrian/traffic change

-Add texture/prefab for the parking lots

UI Functionality

-Implement screenshot function to the interface

-Show thumb position on the left controller

-Add tutorial

-Highlights are not very obvious in the color coded view

Bugs:

-Commercial Hi is not yet functional

-Reset is not functional on floors

-Placement of the buildings issue (scale)

-There is bug when changing a building to park for the first time

-Thunder sound plays when exciting a menu

For the Documentation:

We are documenting all the parts of the project and also working on the instructors manual for the users.

 

This week was the thanksgiving break for the most part of it. But during the initial two days, we worked on the feedback we got from the play testing session of the previous week.

-We fixed the bugs that we saw during the previous week

-We came up with a new iteration of UI

This iteration divide the menu options on both the controllers

-We finished making all the models and imported them all into the scene

-We got the screenshot function working and attached to the UI

 

This week we had two major events:

-Meeting and play testing with the MUD (Master of Urban Designing) students

-Faculty playtesting

MUD students play testing session:

We had 12 MUD students from RCI, CMU visit our project room. They had a lot of input on our product and gave us some valuable information.

They spoke about how they see this product being extremely useful for urban designers.

How we could improve the product for better and what details do the urban designers look for in the site of work in general.

Things in our product they see as very useful components:

-Shadows transitioning depending on the time and height of the buildings

-Buildings size variation

-Reaction of the environment when they make a change to the building

The things that they feel can be added to the product which are very useful for the urban designers:

-Ability for the users to control the minute details in the environment like the trash cans, mail box.

-Placement of objects in the environment

-Positioning of the sidewalks and curbs

In conclusion, they said that the product would be a great tool for urban designers once developed more.

ETC Faculty Playtesting:

We wanted to play test with our faculty members before the softs. So our schedule was to finish play testing in week 12, use week 13 to make the changes and be ready for softs by week 14.

Feedback from the faculty:

Though positive, there were minute things on which we were asked to concentrate on. There were some small bugs in the product which we noted down to work on.

Some of the feedback were:

-sounds should be improved in the environment

-UI design feels like left hand dominated

-The UI is confusing when there is transition between both the hands

We spent the week very productively and we wanted to work on the feedback during the thanksgiving week.