Week 8 is about producing. Based on our work in week 7, we developed more and tested them. Also, since week 9 & 10 is out of the schedule, we talked about half which will be in week 11.
Progress
We developed a more complete play through from the start to the end of scene 1. Our narrative designer made passports to players as their character sheet:
Also an NDA for the players, because in the story they are entering Bletchley Park. (That was really fun when people see that, and it will add more feeling when the players experience they couldn’t tell people their work in later part of the game).
We made changes to the puzzles to make it more clear and intuitive, also we changed the roles of players. Now we have only two different roles: Mathematician and Linguist. Each of the role will have two players.
For the experience, we started to think about how the app could fit in the feedback sessions or be used as a digital prop.
On Tuesday, we had our playtest. We still tested from intro to the end of scene 1.
Playtest session, yes we offered food!
Some important feedback from session:
- The players didn’t feel very much like code breaking when solving the puzzles
- The puzzle in Scene 1 is similar to Intro puzzle, so it felt lime more work instead of thinking
- The collaboration was really good
- Theming need to be improved
- Instructions of puzzles could be clearer
- Everyone liked the food
Based on that, we plan to work on theming more, and make the puzzle in Scene 3 more like a code breaking activity in people’s common understanding. Also, we want to refine the flaws in Scene 1, especially the instructions.
In the latter part of the week, we talked about some logistics and scheduling.
We had process meetings with our instructors. They were mainly about our individual goal and learnings in the semester.
We also talked about half presentation. Following the suggestions from our instructors, we made a basic structure of our presentation, and wrote some guidelines for it:
- Intro to team and client
- Project info
- Goal and problem statement
- Design pillars
- Success image of project
- User journey map
- Narrative
- Puzzle
- App
- Playtest
- Future plan
A very important suggestion is to clarify the goal and define what success means in our project, and use them to direct and evaluate our work.
As for app, we have developed a rough menu frame and interactable 3d objects using Unity for testing. It could be built on both Andriod and iOS platforms.
Talking about schedules, we will get some feedback from our clients, and prepare for the half presentation, and then come up with a schedule for the 4 weeks before soft. The work will mainly include developing Scene 3~5, app and playtesting them.
