This week is our 1/4 walkarounds. During the quarter, we are present the overview of our project to all ETC faculties and will receive tons of feedback from them.
At the beginning of this week, we came together to finally refine our designs. We deleted Dance Battle due to the lack of details and fun and restructured the escape room into a scenario-based game called House Symphony. The “Scenario” here means environment, for example, in the living room, in the kitchen, or in the bathroom, etc. This game can be described as the following steps:
1. Streamer picks one room
2. Streamer picks one set of room items
3. Streamer picks one or more avatar(s)
4. Two viewers will be randomly assigned to one room. Each of them can use resources chosen by streamer in the previous steps to decorate the room
5. For each item/avatar the viewer put in, that viewer needs to record a sound for it
6. Each viewer also needs to validate the sounds that the other viewer uploaded by the form of multiple choices (cross-validation). If there is a match, the sound will be added to the item/avatar.
7. Enjoy the customized room!
We kept the Sound Libs and make it more detailed: basically, it is a combination of sound and Mad Libs. Each time, streamers will be provided some story templates to choose. The templates will be fresh every time. For the blank slots, they are possible to be
- Sound only
- Sound over a speech, which means play the sound and voice over the texts together
- Word + sound, viewers need to put one word and one sound together in one slot
The quarter’s feedback is not great – most faculties are curious why do we use Twitch as the platform, why viewers want to collect sounds for you and doubt if the game is fun or not. These are some main challenges we need to face in the rest of the semester.
The most important feedback we received was: when designing the game, we should think “do we like it”. If we thought the idea is exciting, then make it and playtest it, use the positive result to convince everyone. We should also think of the motivation of collecting sound – instead of thinking hard to design the rewards for viewers doing that, how about finding a way to introduce the wonderfulness of sounds to them? We make them like sounds first, then they would collect the sounds for you spontaneously.
