Blog

I. Overview DTOX is a semester-long project at Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center in collaboration with Games for Change (G4C hereafter). The team includes: Jamie Cui – Programmer / Artist Derrick Pemberton Jr. – Designer / Co-Producer / Writer Parker Ramsey – Co-Producer / Programmer Stefani Taskas – Programmer Sherry Zhang – Designer / Programmer…
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This week was mostly about sharpening up any bits of the project that we still felt needed it. To ensure we were leaving the experience in a good place, we ran two tests this week, as opposed to the usual one. Stress Test The first test was explicitly a stress test. We determined that getting…
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Soft Opening was this week. Softs is a time for faculty to come and experience the project in a “more or less” finished state. They can provide their thoughts on the experience as it is, allowing us another couple weeks to tighten some screws before the project is actually final. Because of Covid, we had…
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We’ve made a good number of updates to our experience since the last playtest and it is really starting to take shape. I’ll go through the updates we made for this week’s playtest on Wednesday, and the updates we’ve got planned before next week’s Soft Opening on Monday. Pretty Effects We’ve added some effects happen…
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Covid-19 Adjustments The advent of Covid-19 means that CMU is now operating on a remote basis for the duration of this semester. We learned about this towards the end of Spring Break. These past few weeks we’ve struggled to find the time to keep up with blogging due to the large shift, but I’ll attempt…
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Halves was this week! This week was spent on preparing for Halves and gathering our thoughts on how to respond to the feedback afterward. We presented our work thus far to the entire faculty with a nifty PowerPoint we’d come up with. Many of the diagrams used in last week’s blog post were originally intended…
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Session Planning We went through and laid out exactly how we want the presentation to go this July at Games for Change. We know that we will need to be concerned with “three” screens – one large presentation screen that everyone sees, one medium sized screen per team (probably an ipad), and one small phone…
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Playtest We playtested our digital prototype. It was a group of 6-8 playtesters playing 4 at a time using Xbox controller to move the cranes while we observed and recorded results. In brief, they didn’t fully understand how to effectively succeed at the game. Not only that, but our designed optimal strategy did not come…
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Iterating Our Transformations We wanted to revisit our transformation this week based on some advice from our faculty. There was a general impression that the transformations were general, underdeveloped, and under-explored. Given that, we did another iteration pass to really tease out the different possible transformations and keep in mind how they may intersect with…
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