This week we came back from mid-semester break with a lot of energy and plenty of things to do. We wanted to work fast and get the three components, the website, mobile application and the rolling game, to be ready before our next playtest. Playtest 3 was schedule on November 2nd, Playtest day in ETC. To achieve our goal, we divided the responsibilities :
- Design and Art : Jingya
- Rolling game : Yifeng
- Streamer website : Charley
- Mobile Application : Ann Maria
- Back-end connection/Database : Yikai
Jingya made a design document for a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and Yifeng started working on bringing it to life.
After talking to our client about our design plans, Jessica suggested to create a design for the streamer-viewer recognition experience that would help to make our game more exciting and interesting. We wanted it to be a standalone experience to give the streamers the freedom to play the experience as either a record and donate sounds or as a complete package, where they could collect sounds and play the rolling game. The recognition phase had to be encouraging and fun enough to motivate the viewers to collect more sound. We wanted to highlight the community contributions and individual contributions.
We also wanted an unlocking system in the mobile application that would motivate viewers to record more sounds and validate sounds. The design plan was to let them unlock new models and also new effects that could be played during the game. This would allow the viewers to stand out and get more recognition from the streamer.
We did two streamer interviews this week to understand their perspective and to get a better idea on how to make our experience cater to streamers needs. Some of the suggestions that we got from the streamers are :
- Sending out the task before streaming starts might not be effective. Have an option for the streamer to choose when to start collecting sounds
- Streamers want to keep the viewers busy and give them reasons to stay
- Viewer likes instant gratification
- Give rewards when recording sounds
- Let the streamers set the time limit to collect sounds during streaming
- Validation: Give streamer the option to choose to have a validation phase to filter sounds collected y the viewers
After the interview, both the streamers showed interest in playtesting our game and asked us to let them know when we are ready for a Twitch playtest. This encouraged us and gave us an extra boost to achieve our goals.
