The week of 1/4s has past! We had the opportunity to meet with the ETC faculty and share our progress so far and get feedback about our direction. At the end of the week, we held one playtest which you can read about on the playtest section of this site.
Our feedback at 1/4s was mixed and we will be sitting down as a team on Monday to go over it all. Many faculty members were supportive and excited about our progress, but some were confused about the work we’ve done so far. We hope that we will better explain the purpose of our playtests at 1/2s and have a clearer explanation of the guest experience we want to build this semester.
From tech:
Not many tech things happened this week. However, during quarter walkarounds, several faculty members mentioned some tech we could use to make the experience better such as using IR camera and computer vision to track guests’ movement in the room, directional speakers that can only be heard in certain positions and so on. We also found a set of “sound jars” that were used before and now taken down in the wood shop, and they might become something useful for us as well. Overall, there are many new things we could think about and decide whether or not we want to experiment with them.
From design:
This week I worked on our quarter presentation and coming up with a playtest for Friday. Through quarter feedback from the faculty, I felt the need for us to really find a clear vision and implement our future tests based on it. Our last playtest got us excited about the “multi-player” experience. For this Friday, we as a group came with an idea to test the puzzle element of it. We divided the dark room into two sections, and two players had to give each other the necessary information to solve the puzzle. Overall, we found out that any information we give to the people need to have meaning and if we want the guests to do certain things, it should absolutely be clear, especially when guests are blind folded. Now we need to come up with clearer goals for our final experience. During the next two weeks of testing with sense of smell, we’ll be talking about what we actually want to achieve.
From art:
For art and construction this week, we had less work than normal. The main piece that we had to work on this week was to set up the environment for the Friday playtest, as we did not have a playtest on Wednesday. Most of the time that we had left over for the week was put into brainstorming for the playtest Friday, and 1/4s presentations and meetings.
Next week we will go over all of our feedback, work on a more specific set of goals for the final experience, and begin playtesting with smell in our experience after a smell workshop from Heather.