Week 14: Soft Presentations, Remote Edition!

This week, we had our Softs Presentation with Pittsburgh Faculty and we continued to iterate on our presentation based off of both the feedback we received from our presentation, as well as from our client meeting last week. Many thanks to Mike, Scott, and John for taking the time to meet with us on Monday and talk through the latest version of our pitch presentation, as we got a lot of good feedback to address going forward into finals!

The Work This Week

Softs Meeting with Pittsburgh Faculty

Our meeting with Mike, Scott, and John was relatively brief, especially since we had only made a couple of minor tweaks since our meeting with Mike and John last Thursday, but we did receive the following feedback during our time together:

• We still need to better emphasize why the game would be fun to play with others, as we’re currently missing some major information to full realize the pros and cons of inviting others and/or being invited
• While the reward of getting skills is understood (although a chart of skills would be very helpful), there needs to be more information detailing why these skills would attract players. In other words, what is my motivation to play the game, and what is the emotional reward, and how is that tied to the skills?
• To our faculty members, it’s still a bit unclear how Google Stadia amplifies the experience. Do players get in quickly before the quick game is over? Does it help pace the game? We should walk through why Immunoo is well suited to Stadia and how it will succeed on the platform, as this would help the ETC evaluate the success of our project.
• We should try to nail down some of the timing of the game, such as what does an overall play session look like? How long does a player have to pick up an invite before it expires?
• Overall, the game seems to have great potential, and the high-level game was fairly clear if missing some major information to fully realize the pros and cons of the game.

Updating Our Presentation

Based off of the above critiques and our client meeting last week, we set about accomplishing the following tasks:

• Better explain why playing with others in our game would be fun or necessary
• Create a chart of the kinds of skills that can be acquired by players in the game and illustrate their use quickly and simply
• Come up with a DLC release schedule
• Create a mock-up of when non-Stadia users join the game
• Design tasks that will require players to collaborate by using their skills together to hunt viruses.

We wanted to address the feedback from faculty up front, so we came together to brainstorm not only skills that we could display in our skill chart, but also skills that would easily lend themselves to collaborative play. From this Wenyu created some sample tasks that could be accomplished by white blood cells working together, one of which we added to our presentation in draft form.

As we were determining these tasks, we also got together to define what we would put in our DLC after release, coming up with the following maps: The Intestines, The Brain, and The Kidneys. As a team, we generated some enemy types and environmental hazards for each map. Additionally, we determined what maps we would have ready by release, which are The Heart, The Lungs, and The Stomach. We also determined skills needed in each of these maps, along with some corresponding enemy types.

Jue created an onboarding mock-up of what a non-Stadia user will see when they join the game in the form of a GIF, and she also created a GIF the better demonstrated how the State Share game invite system works than our previous iteration.

In addition to the above tasks, we updated some of our graphics, such as our overall sketch of The Heart, to better reflect the visual polish found in other parts of the presentation, as well as added a slide that better detailed the “fantasy” of the game and broke down how much extra we would need for our DLC in our budget.

Client Meeting

We showed Erin our latest iteration of the presentation on Friday, who was extremely pleased with the progress we had made in such a short amount of time. Erin herself said that we shouldn’t make too many edits to the presentation now, as we had basically already hit upon a good final draft. Our next step is to create a video recording that walks through the entire pitch deck, beginning to end, so that we can work with Erin to workshop the overall flow over the course of next week.

The Plan for Next Week

It’s certainly been quite a wild ride to look back on everything we’ve gone through and accomplished since January! As the specter of Final Presentations looms ever closer, we have outlined the following tasks for Week 15 that we still need to accomplish:

• Create a video of Liam going through the flow of the pitch presentation, which includes not only a cast of the slide deck, but also of Liam as well.
  • Workshop our pitch deck flow with Erin
• Update the thumbnails for our DLC chart and graphics in our Skills section
• Create our slide deck for Final Presentations!