This week, we focused on the design of the room and its puzzles. We visited the Center for Creative Reuse of Pittsburgh to start to build an idea of what furniture and props our room will be full of. It turned out to be even better than we had expected - so many things to reuse! We also met with a group of first year ETC students who were interested in our project. They gave us a lot of feedback and helped us get excited about our project again! From design: This week we planned a playtest that aimed to…

The week of halves has passed and team Lights Out is transitioning to the second half of the semester - building! We are continuing with our theme of a cabin, which was chosen because it is the closest to what the space actually will be (a wooden structure full of furniture we find). We are theming the story so that the cabin belongs to someone with a secret and a lot of high-tech security, which will help to explain the darkness and the need to leave the space quickly. Here is a model that Dale built of the structure we…

This week was set aside for design decisions and preparation. We had no playtests, but we had a visitor from MC2 and had a very productive meeting with Dave C. He reminded us of the importance of having a design framework, so we spent the rest of the week creating design documents (like personas, user stories, and design pillars) and working to finalize our design that we will build for the end of this semester. We also spent a lot of time working on and preparing for our halves presentation next week. In our 1/2s presentation, we want to emphasize…

This week, we made a lot of progress toward our final goal. We got a lot of input from five different company visits - Amazon Twitch, Universal Creative, ILM xLAB, Take-Two, and Activision. They gave us a lot of great ideas and made us even more excited to be working on this project, and we thank all our visitors for their time! We also got the opportunity to meet with Miguel Reyes from the Blind and Visual Rehabilitation Services of Pittsburgh, where he helps people who are visually impaired learn to move around in this sighted world. He showed us…