Lights Out is starting to playtest so often that we will post detailed information about them in the playtest section of this site. This will also make our weekly updates less intimidatingly long 🙂

We focused on touch this week rather than sound, because we did not yet have all the equipment we wanted for sound testing, but sound still found its way into our tests this week in a significant way. Also, this week Tina Blaine was at the ETC and was generous enough to stop by our project room! See the previous newsletter (a special edition which also talks about Ruth Comley’s equally generous visit last week) for more about her visit.

Design:

This week, I worked on brainstorming for touch playtests. Along with other ideas from the team, we came up with 2 tests that we wanted to try. One was to test if we can generate a certain environment (arctic place) using fans and arctic wind ambient sounds and to test if people can recognize simple letters/numbers through touching the surface. We learned few things that so that we can manipulate environment in better ways and people could also read through touching their hands.

The second test was to test if people could still have a pleasant experience while putting one’s hands into a box to identify certain things. We used a simple story (to save a man from a dungeon) and pleasant, epic music. Many players had a positive reaction putting their hands into the box. It was really encouraging to find out that people could have a pleasant experience while touching unknown objects as long as the appropriate mood and mission is given. So it’s exciting.

Also I’ll be working on researching and learning how 5.1 surround sound could be designed and created.

Tech:

This week we finally set up the 5.1 stereo sound system and ran a few test sounds on it. The system is working pretty well – the only problem is that it’s quite difficult to find 5.1 audios on the Internet. Related to that, in the near future, we want to try to learn how to make surround sounds ourselves. We also want to start looking at how to build 5.1 sounds with Unity next week.

We also have our night vision camera ready now thanks to the help of the great Steve and John, the masters of all the IT problems. We should be able to finally use them to record our playtests in the dark beginning next week.

Art:

We showed off the first draft of our team branding to a group of art faculty that walked around checking all of the teams branding materials on Monday. The response was very positive with a few critiques and some suggestions. Those critiques were on the poster’s logo font, that being the leading letters of the team name. They also were worried about color blending at the printers on the poster, but also thought that if it did blend it would work to our advantage. One of the suggestions was to make the poster logo blend into the background. For the over logo, and the half sheets, they were very happy. During the week we tried to implement the suggestion of the poster image, but we were unable to get the design to work. We also wrapped up the second draft of the branding materials that will be reviewed on Monday in the branding workshop.

Next week we will be continuing with touch testing. It’s looking like a busy week but we are excited to explore areas like balance, spatial awareness and wayfinding, and multiplayer cooperation.