Month: October 2015

This week we conducted our latest playtest about our new updates to multiplayer, new videos, and location controller.  In addition, we also began preparing for our Halves presentation next week.  For the playtest, we had a total of 10 people from EA that came to our space to play the game.  Some of these people even included marketing directors of the Xfinity Games platform.  *Cool!* 

Our goal for the new videos we created were to gain an understanding about how the different mixing & video-cutting styles affect a player's interest and engagement.  We discovered that one style was too intense while the other was more like the interest curve that we wanted.  We'll use this data to find a way to affect a player's engagement by mapping our video levels to interest curves.  Hopefully, we'll be able to develop some standard and guideline for this process to make it simple to do as well.  

As for multiplayer, we received some very helpful feedback and watched how players interacted during gameplay.  Just as we expected, players had a tendency to "cheat" by pressing the button when someone else had found an object.  We gave those players a lower score but they didn't seem to be extremely concerned about that.  This is an issue that we have to fix in the coming weeks. It was great to see that our positive feedback for when a player found an object was working.  Everyone reported that they could tell when they found an object! 

 

With our Half Presentations next week, we began preparing our slides and topics to discuss.  We already had one practice on Thursday which helped to nail down what we needed to work on.  Hopefully Faceless will do a great job during the presentations and get all of our viewers excited about our progress.

~Faceless Prod.

A little late with this update.  Faceless has been preparing for a playtest this coming week and things have been a bit busy.  This has been a pretty good week for us.  Our research into what makes great content for our game has been coming along well and we realized we needed a playtest desperately!   Jake and Tim have been dealing with interest curves and determine how to craft each level to be a fun/engaging experience.  We need a lot of feedback from players about our latest videos that are mapped to interest curves.  

On the programming side, our basic game loop has been created (yay!).  Thanks to Sam, We can now choose which video level to play via a basic "level select" menu.  This is a great addition because we've had to add new videos manually to Unity each time which was a bit tedious.  We've also gotten a basic version of multiplayer finished.  We've only had a few people play it so far so we aren't entirely sure how player's like this mode compared to single player, but we'll find out at the playtest. 

We had a surprise visit Friday, our advisor Heather Kelley stopped by all the way from Pittsburgh.  It was enjoyable having her around for the first time since the semester started.  All of our other meetings had been over Skype, so this was really refreshing.  She's great!

Look forward to our results next week.

-Faceless Prod.

Faceless has uncovered some interesting findings during this week!  After our Monday advisor meeting, we have decided to begin our video analysis process.  We've learned that using videos has an interesting effect on gameplay, primarily that the video provides entertainment and the gameplay changes that. Essentially, the video has a separate interest curve than our game itself. It's a weird thing to think about.  So we'll be applying the interest curve to our video levels that we make from now on.  This was we can control our levels better to what we want to player to experience.  Along with that, Jake has also made some new videos to use for testing.  We're focusing on analyzing what makes things fun for the videos.  We made a version of the game using images for the objects instead of text.  Unfortunately, we haven't had the opportunity to test it much yet.  Based upon the amount of work it takes to make the images though, it may not be a feasible thing to do for the game.  But we'll see.

During this week, we updated our UI to show results at the end of a level.  We're going to be adding a result screen to the phone screen as well.  We haven't gotten around to implementing the main menu yet but we'll get there.  Once that happens, things will feel like a more complete experience.  

Sam has made some more progress with the video editing tool so now we can specify object locations.  Which is great news because now we can use our location-based controller for gameplay instead of just a button.  This should really affect the experience in a good way.

Lastly, we began working with video streaming.  As of now, we can upload and download videos via server to the game.  It's a start.

For next week, we're looking to implement multiplayer for the first time!  As well as getting further in our video level analysis and more testing.

Look out and find us next week.