We had “Quarters”. It’s a term at the ETC that a number of faculty divided into several smaller groups watch our presentation and give us feedback about our current work and project direction.
TLDR
The escape room is a clever idea but the physical outbuild of an escape room is out of scope. We need to communicate with our clients to refine the scope.
Advice
- How to make Spots do things people can’t do?
- Players are not able to move
- Spots interact with virtual elements
- Spots interact with physical objects so guests could see the changes in the room.
- Remote control? Virtual game.
- How to elicit emotion?
- Look into references where the dog is a companion
- Spots’ legs are strongly communicated. Pay attention to the legs.
- Spots should earn trust in the early stages of the game.
- How to make a plan?
- Figure out what Spots can do and build around these abilities. (Jesse’s advice)
- Narrow the scope and communicate with the client.
- Pay attention to Spots’ constraints. Make players be aware of the constraints and work with the constraints.
More importantly, we were told that due to CMU’s “remote instruction” policy, we won’t be able to go to the ETC building, which became the biggest challenge given the fact that we are building a “physical” game. We then had a few team discussion, we agreed to put our focus on mini-games and offer a simple background of an escape room just to connect the mini-games. We needed to discuss this plan with our clients.
We effectively communicated with them about our constraints and we agreed that our focus should be mini-games instead of the actual “escape room”. They confirmed that the top priority is that the mini-game should not just be fun but is a game that can’t play without Spot. They clearly indicated that they need a program for them to test out at the end of this semester.
With such more refined direction, we started to make progress on design new mini-game ideas!
Moreover, it’s time to come up with a long-term plan for the project. We divided our work into 4 categories and set goals for each category for the milestones.
Of course, plan is plan. We might need to adjust our plan in the future but we felt excited and ready make more progress