Halves presentations are coming up and we are starting to finalize the chapter one prototype as we’re shifting gears for production soon. We also recently learned that GDC (Games Developers Conference) has been postponed therefore we’re given more time to work on the project with the team now here for an extra week.
We were also able to outline the flow chart of the finalized version of Chapter One and we can use that as the building blocks for the Chapters going forwards. This will help us better explain the story so we can receive better feedback while also making sure the team is on the same page.
Last week we received more feedback that there was still more work to be done to learn the mechanics therefore we worked on introducing an on-boarding phase to prepare guests with instructions on how to play the game. We made further development on the UI and we added a new mechanic where players can now play the violin on the iPad. Something that many people expressed desire to do in our game.
To better prompt the players to look at the screen we added a new typing feedback effect to the instructions so that they become more aware of the changes on the screen and once role playing begins we turned off the camera function so they can recognize when we want them to role play. Now players will hear typewriter sounds and see a typing animation in the UI so they will notice when there is new dialogue to be read.
Everyone is hard at work as we each focus on our own individual tasks so we are ready for Halves.
Derek – Worked on the paper prototype for on-boarding.
Sally – Started preparation on halves presentation and acquired a new space to set up our demo.
Ryan – Programmed new violin mechanic and added more UI feedback.
Minz – Updated UI and worked with Derek on on-boarding paper prototype.
Chelsea – Created a violin model for new game mechanic.
This week we also had the opportunity to meet Tess Tanenbaum from University of California Irvine who was on campus to talk about her experience with mixed reality. She gave us a lot of feedback on our current build and how we can improve on the overall role playing experience.
Now that halves is quickly approaching we split our times working on the build and getting ready for the halves presentation. We revised it numerous times with our faculty advisers and Jessica Hammer in order to best convey what our project is about and how we got to where we are now.
After halves is the start of spring break and we will finally start building the final chapters of our demo and start preparing our materials for the conference in June.
Chapter One Iteration with flower sorting and composing mechanic
The two biggest challenges this week was to
-1) Revise the current Chapter One build and add character introductions.
-2) Construct an outline script for the other chapters.
We received a lot of feedback from both our clients, advisers, and other faculty therefore while we can’t implement all their inputs this week we decided to set forth on what could be fixed immediately and other glaring interactions that needed additional reworking.
Previously on the first prototype sprint, we were more focused on getting the core logic in having the full experience from beginning to end for chapter one. This week we are spending more time polishing the build and getting the game mechanics locked in. We are redesigning the UI so it no longer obstructs the players view and revising the game design so we can make the experience more accessible to the user.
Derek – Revisited the game design and developed the outline script for future chapters.
Sally – Created 3D assets and assisted with script development.
Ryan – Programmed the new storyline and added additional game mechanics to the build.
Minz – Created 2D assets and designed new UI/UX assets.
Chelsea – Created environmental assets and additional 3D models.
Chapter One Iteration with “Meet-Cute” Scene
Going forward we took Dave Culyba’s suggestion and decided to continually readjust our design pillars to fit the game as we continue to design it.
We shifted our design pillars this week to
-1) Multiplayer
-2) “My world is getting smaller“
-3) “We choose each other”
-4) “I am Complicit” (Audience)
As our game is more narrative focused we wanted to emphasize what we wanted our audience to experience and establish the goals we are designing towards as we build the game.
Chapter One Flower Giving Mechanic
After presenting our newest build to Jessica Hammer this week we got some valuable feedback as we continue to build towards halves. Jessica initially wanted us to start building the other chapters, however we were able to convince her that we should continue to build out chapter one so we can better outline the following chapters. Once we have committed to the design mechanics and narrative of chapter one then we can have a much stronger narrative going forward. Therefore next week we will focus on executing the finishing touches on chapter one along with adding a prelude to better transition the guest into the experience.
We are shifting gears a bit into next week as out team is getting ready for halves presentations while getting our prototype for chapter one into its final stages and ready for production.
For Week 5, our biggest goal was creating the first chapter that includes both game logic and art assets implemented in the game that we can fully show off to our client, Jessica Hammer.
Deliver the first production sprint to showcase a interaction between the two characters, Max and Annaliese in Rosenstrasse.
For the initial first weeks, our programmer was busy with the golden spike and making sure that networking was up and running. We predicted that this would be the most difficult obstacle to overcome therefore we decided to start with this first so that we can focus the rest of the project semester on reiterating on the narrative aspect of the game.
Now that that is all well and done we can now focus on the game itself and implementing chapters of the game.
Each member of our team was busy with delivering their pipeline
Ryan – Programming all the logic in the game and debugging
Derek – Reiterating on how we can improve the game design goals and start design on future chapters.
Minz – Working on creating original AR markers and implementing UI.
Chelsea – Creating environmental assets and picking music selection.
Sally – Creating interact-able assets in the scene and improving story arcs.
Chapter One Sprint with completed assets
At the end of the week we showed off our build to both Jessica and Erica and received helpful feedback on which story arcs she felt was most important in order to create a complete experience. To summarize what we learned was that we should
Think broadly about what each player is doing at every moment and make sure there are no gaps between actions.
Incorporate the map more in the gameplay.
Start on the next two chapters and complete an arc.
Experiment on more interactions we could use.
We also squeezed in a meeting with faculty professor, Dave Culyba for more game design perspective on how to improve the player interaction in the game. After experiencing our first build he gave us a lot of design goals to reflect on and things to consider as we are building our future builds.
Constantly update our Design Pillars to reflect our game as it changes as we learn what we can or can’t achieve.
Think more about why we are making the player do anything.
Consider the emotional goal of the game and reflect choices on those emotions.
Overall we learned a lot from not just our meetings but from the build itself on what works and what doesn’t and we’ll use this to have a solid prototype by halves in two weeks.
-1) Communicate the design space and progress of the team during Quarter walk arounds
-2) Create initial designs to separate between Prototype 1 or 2 in order to choose which of the two to proceed forward with.
Unfortunately, preparations for the first took up more time than anticipated and resulted in abridged time to create interactive prototypes for either idea. While Art and UI were able to create mood boards, Design was unable to create paper prototypes that captured the core feelings of either pitch. Tech was able to create a Networking Gold Spike and basic AR glyph recognition in lieu of more specific AR functionality or features in service of a larger design goal. In theory this functionality would be core to either pitch, but we lacked specificity for what we wanted each design to do.
Quarters presentations were fairly successful with faculty providing feedback that demonstrated an understanding of the goals of the project: we were definitely able to tell them what we wanted to do, but many faculty are skeptical of our ability to do it.
In terms of materials we created a roadmap documenting our process and our current Design goals of:
-Augmenting the current storytelling experience (e.g. concentrating the emotional impact, using media other than text)
-Making the experience more accessible (e.g. by lowering the barrier to entry to verbal roleplaying)
-Conveying Historical information besides through text (e.g. creating a floor sized board representing Berlin)
Feedback from the faculty fell broadly into 4 categories:
We need to figure out the specific space affordances of IMX. Are players going to be exposed to crowds? Can we get a blackbox curtained off space? Can we get mood lighting? Should we just showcase promotional materials instead of the experience itself.
We need to be very specific with how we use AR. AR has a very bad track record for immersive storytelling. Managing attention is very tricky. Making people hold iPads will fatigue them. The real world will never be as good or as entertaining as the fictional world, so much so that seeing a real wall will likely break immersion, a crucial component of Role-playing games. Players of AR games also don’t tend to play with AR mechanics for more than 10 mins at a time.
One very insightful conversation revolved around the logistics of having iPads rendering AR: the iPad batteries will die VERY fast. Additionally whose iPads will they be? The ETCs?
We need to seriously consider our design goals in relation to Rosenstrasse: The current design goals are not specific to the Transformational goals or the storytelling goals of Rosenstrasse. Rather they appear to be specific to accessibility of roleplaying games.
We need to start prototyping and thinking about how to build a floor sized board. The idea of the board got a lot of faculty’s attention but raised questions about materials, its role in the broader design of the game, interaction with AR mechanics, etc.
Quarters were followed with a further sit down meeting with Chris Klug and Drew Davidson who echoed many of these statements. Drew in particular noted two options for our team to “create poetic experiences using AR.” We could focus on the tech managing the complex logic and just enable verbal roleplaying OR we could attempt to foster those feelings from mechanics besides roleplaying (such as by looking at images together).
Our meeting with our client cemented our team’s direction: pursue the second prototype with the physical board from the first prototype. With this in mind, the project has 4 design pillars:
Multiplayer: the experience will have at least 2 people interact with both the game and any other player in the experience.
Sacred Physical Space: the experience will have a physical space where players traverse a physical board that adds to the emotional experience
Poetic Experiences: the game will revolve around interactive poetic experiences that capture the emotional essence of the source material. In other words, players should experience similar emotions as the original Rosenstrasse but with mechanics or actions specific to AR.
Complicit Onlookers: the experience will have mechanics for onlookers that captures the essence of being complicit in the suffering of Jews under the Nazi regime. This might take the form of a reporting mechanic that impacts the experience of those in the sacred physical space.
Our team elected to move our usual sprint planning session from Friday afternoon to core hours of Monday afternoon with the intention to come with ideas that answer these 4 design pillars.
Overall a busy week. In a perfect world we would be situated to very soon exit pre-production (or even pre-pre-production a term coined by Dave Culyba to refer to Client teams that must figure out the bounds of their creative space before figuring out how to tackle it design-wise). Next week we hope to have a playable experience with an answer to these design pillars in mind. What weighs heavy on my mind is the reality that the halfway mark is only 3 weeks away. If all we’ve accomplished in 4 weeks is slightly more certainty and no builds, I worry that in 7 weeks we will have accomplished 2 builds and knowledge of how we failed to meet our design goals. Time will tell and builds are the path forward.
-2) Brainstorm ideas after play testing and pitch those to Jessica Hammer
To begin the week, on Monday we planned a much needed play through of Rosenstrasse, the game which we have officially decided to incorporate AR with. We originally planned on reaching out to a player who is more experienced with Rosenstrasse to help run the game, however as we were short on time we decided to go ahead and run the games ourselves. Erica Cruz also joined us during the game as an observer. As most of our team is unfamiliar with playing tabletop role-playing games we dived head first and committed 7 hours to play through the game’s entirety. After we finished the game, we continued to brainstorm on our previous ideas and develop new ones based on what we learned firsthand.
Tuesday we met with our faculty advisers to discuss our plan moving forward as well as let them in on the feedback we received from Jessica. After the meeting we met once again to develop our ideas and decide which ones we planned on keeping and replacing. We assigned each member of the team an idea that we continued to flesh out and develop into a presentable pitch to our client, Jessica Hammer.
Wednesday we met once again to discuss our pitches and get feedback on what’s missing and what we can improve on. We met individually to brainstorm more ideas and continued to develop those ideas for the next meeting.
Thursday we met once again with finalized pitch ideas and presented them to each other. We made last minute changes to our presentation and started preparing our final materials for our client meeting on Friday.
Friday we met with Jessica Hammer at the Oh!Lab to reiterate our previous ideas to her in a more developed stage.
1) Wordless Rosenstrasse
A simplified version of Rosenstrasse which players uses action cards to emote through AR and aide players who are unfamiliar with role-playing based games.
2) Rosenstrasse – The floor-sized Physical Board Game
A digital board game where players can move around physical space and role play as characters in Berlin as a Jew where the world works against you.
3) Rosenstrasse – A storytelling experience + Minigames
An asymmetrical puzzle experience where two players play as couple experience the difficulties of living in Berlin as a Jewish German couple.
4) Location Based Experience
A gallery installation where people can step into the world of Rosenstrasse through AR mapping and play through couple scenarios with other gallery goers.
5) AR Florence Experience
A Florence-inspired AR game with location based experiences.
After hearing our pitches, Jessica reacted positively to all our ideas and stated that we should incorporate many features from each pitch and combine them into two pitches, a AR location based-like experience and a Digital Board game with role playing features.
Using this information, we decided we had enough approved concepts that we could start our golden spike and begin the digital prototyping stages for the upcoming weeks. We will continue to develop these two ideas and present Jessica with more tangible pitches which she can experience in our next meeting.
-Engineering: Ryan summarized his thoughts on Hololens vs. Mobile vs. Oculus AR
Week 2
In Week 2 of the semester, Project memoiAR’s meteoric rise to greatness continued in the usual fashion: with everyone reminding us to start prototyping and learn about our audience as soon as possible. This message was echoed broadly from our faculty advisers, our first playtest/brainstorming workshop (hosted by Mike Christel and John Dessler), a workshop on the Transformational Games Framework (hosted by Sabrina Culyba), and even our weekly client meeting with Jessica Hammer.
Our team began the week with a brainstorm session on Monday. In the course of our brainstorm, our team also began to coalesce around two of the five original games: Rosenstrasse and Beyond the Stars. We decided not to build anything concrete before playing Rosenstrasse itself.
Tuesday saw us touching base with our faculty advisers. I personally asked for their perspective on what to do about the creative direction to “go and kick ass at the coming conference.”* Tom and Heather recommended we trust in the iterative design process, which begins with the first prototype. The trap teams fall into is the trap of indecision: we don’t know what direction to go in because we don’t know which will be good. Spoiler alert: all paths start with a bad first build. Iterative design works to make bad prototypes less bad over time. Since our team felt the most confident about Rosenstrasse, we were directed to play the full 4-5 hour version of the game. We planned to play it on Thursday.
Wednesday saw us attend a playtesting and creative workshop with Mike Christel and John Dessler. It also stressed the importance of starting the iterative design process, or playtest loop as Mike called it. One thing it made crystal clear was that we were struggling to understand the emotional core of Rosenstrasse. Our team settled on something along the lines of “a large and foreboding entity threatens something you love and here are available ways to grapple with it.” That felt unsatisfactory and frustrating, but we decided that we’d figure it out in greater detail when we played the game on Thursday.
Thursday saw our team attending the Transformational Games Workshop held by Sabrina Culyba. Of note, our team decided that Rosenstrasse’s original transformational goals revolved around 2 features: emotional engagement with historical contexts. It honestly shed light to design processes that had previously eluded me personally and my teammates. Our team further reflected that Rosenstrasse in its current incarnation was likely already doing the Transformational heavy lifting, which left us to grapple with what our AR version could do to add to it. We settled on either widening the intended audience or potentially tackling the shortcomings of verbal roleplaying as a primary means to tell stories with other players and explore emotional spaces. We threw this onto the pile of questions we’d ask Jessica Hammer on Friday.
For Friday, we ran our 5 prototypes by Erica. In short they were:
1) a wordless interactive graphic novel/film version of Rosenstrasse using cards to communicate emotional states.
2) an asymmetrical puzzle game. Since the events leading up to the Rosenstrasse march impacted different groups differently, why not explore asymmetrically impacted perspectives through asymmetrical mechanics?
3) a Florence-style non-interactive story with interactive mini-games
4) an AR Digital Boardgame
5) a real-world scale room escape.
Erica saw we were more excited about some prototypes than others, but challenged us to challenge our platform assumptions: “Get away from the table and get away from the screen.”
Jess echoed this advice and offered feedback on the prototypes:
1) Jess has seen games flounder in this space. Tackling both a platform change and a mechanics change for Rosenstrasse would radically increase the scope of the project.
2) An interesting idea that hits at the heart of Rosenstrasse. She advised us to consider weaving in the complicity card mechanics.
3) A Florence-style version might be an avenue for reaching teens, something Rosenstrasse explicitly avoids in order to explore the full, graphic historical context.
4) A digital boardgame might also be an avenue for a museum installation
5) Like the first concept, a real-world room escape version might struggle with both platform constraints and reengineering the wheel that is Rosenstrasse’s current mechanics.
As a designer, Jess also elaborated on the heart of the game and made a very strong case for verbal mechanics as a core vehicle for emotional exploration. Our team had previously balked at the prospect of constructing an English-language role-playing game, especially given the fact that most of our team spoke English as a second language and had little experience with tabletop roleplaying. It was an illuminating discussion that gives me confidence in the creative future of the project, but also makes me stressed at the work necessary to get there. We’ll all look back fondly on this moment someday. Not today. But someday.
Our meeting with Jess concluded with the lovely constraint/challenge to make 5 concept prototypes by our next Friday Meeting. Our team responded with a gameplan to play Rosenstrasse, read all the design documentation, brainstorm new prototypes, and then execute on the prototypes in 3 days. I’m skeptical of such an ambitious goal, but am heartened at the engagement and passion my team has thus far shown for this project.
We’ll definitely have stories to tell at Quarters. That’s for sure.
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*While that wasn’t the exact phrasing or even intent of Dr. Hammer at our first meeting, that is how I affectively encoded the event.
We are memoiAR, a five person team developing a AR innovative narrative to enhance live action experiences. This project is sponsored by Dr. Jessica Hammer.
Production
This week we got all our housekeeping out of the way, setting up our computers and starting to decorate our project rooms.
We also arranged meetings with our client Dr. Jessica Hammer as well as our faculty advisers, Heather Kelley and Tom Corbett. We were even able to wrangle in the help of Ph. D student, Erica Cruz under the suggestion of Dr. Hammer who will be a valuable game design resource for our team.
Platform
As an AR focused project we have the choice between mobile, Magic Leap, Holo Lens, and Oculus.
Currently we are still prototyping the capabilities of each platform before we decide which would best suit our goals.
