Week 4: Design Constraints, Quarters, and New Game Design Pitches!

Based upon the feedback from our client of week 03, we tried to propose several game scenarios and try to clarify the boundary of our design constraint.

 We can conclude our design scenarios in the following ways:

1. A local multiplayer experience with a core facial recognition mechanic that only uses one phone.
2. A local multiplayer experience where all the players are in the same room, but it uses the facial recognition capabilities of the Kinect coupled with a TV.

3. An isolated, asynchronous multiplayer experience that uses facial recognition and is played on mobile.

4. A real time, multiplayer rhythm game that uses facial recognition that is also networked, meaning that the individuals are not necessarily in the same room to play.

5. A multiplayer mobile experience oriented around expressing and recognizing emotions that doesn’t explicitly use facial recognition to verify if a person’s expression is “correct”.

6. A mobile experience that uses facial recognition as a core mechanic that features a video recording of a “fictional” individual.

From the response to those scenarios, we concluded our design constraints in the following three aspects:

1. Emphasize Connection: primary focus on creating a transformational game that facilitates social engagement

2. Multiplayer: Incorporation of another individual into our experience through local multiplayer 

3. Mobile Platform:Determine how to insert a mobile phone into a social game that doesn’t create feelings of alienation

We made our design goal very clear :A transformational mobile game that uses AR and facial tracking to help people feel more comfortable in social situations.

This week, we also held a meeting with Schell Game. We talked with the group who worked on similar project. Our topic covered facial recognition tech limitation, time limitation, scope of goals. We watched their game demo and discussed about core design ideas and realization of those ideas.

In tech side, we did reaches of different tech platforms.

1. Affectiva: It is a 3rd party facial recognition SDK for unity. It can detect happy accurately, but for  the other emotions, it doesn’t function well.

2. SpakrAR: It is a Facebook AR SDK. It has its own networking system but they shut down the networking system one week after our test.

3. ARkit 2 and 3. It is a very new technology. It uses depth camera and we think it worth exploring more.