This week, we had a few visits, a workshop, and one playtest (more here). Robyn Miller and Richard Vander Wende and a small team from EA were kind enough to stop by during the week and share some thoughts about our project, and we also had a very educational meeting with Jess Hammer who helped us reframe the way we were thinking about playtests and gathering data. Because of this meeting, we asked for emotional responses on the valence-arousal model after this week's playtest and found that we seem to be on the right track! Heather Kelley also donated a…

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…

Week 4 was a long and exciting week for team Lights Out. In addition to our usual 2 playtests (more on those here), we had some industry and faculty visits and even found time to do an escape room as a team (for inspiration, of course). We had the opportunity to chat with visitors from Blizzard and Riot about our project in the middle of this week. Many of them were excited by the concept of something nonvisual and found our playtests so far interesting, but largely recommended that we find more of a direction. Also this week, we got…

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…