Week 7 (2/24 – 2/28)

Previous Week

Last week the team completed and tested the core functionality we wanted to put in the hands of our users for the first playtest.  The programmer’s finished tying all the completed aspects together and getting the art assets in place as the artists finished the decorations for the user’s house, avatar frames, and pieces of the UI.  The game designers also came up with a full specification for the first iteration of the game’s experience points and level system and survey’s for upcoming playtest.

Week Overview

This week the team had the exciting experience of our first playtest of Questyinz social on Monday with a fourth grade class at Dickson Elementary.  Following the playtest, the team went through the results and recorded the data.  Much of the feedback given by the students either through direct questioning or the surveys, reinforced the the direction the team was going in terms of functionality, but it also reaffirmed advisor feedback from 1/4s indicating that we needed to make all the interactions as playful as possible and create a “juicy” experience.  The team then which functionality we wanted to strive for in the next playtest and tasked the designers with developing a more fun interface for searching and navigating through friends.

Progress

By the end of the week the team had begun to redesign the friends feature based on feedback from the first playtest  and had near finalized art assets for additional objects in the house, miniatures of houses for the outdoor neighborhood representing user friend lists, and  an additional avatar for the players to choose.

Prospect

Next week the team plans to integrate completed art assets, and finalize initial functionality for players to find and add friends , as well as visit the spaces of those friends.  Additionally , the artists will be completing animations for the existing characters and the designers will complete the paper prototype of the redesigned friend searching interface.  All of this, of course, will be in the hopes of having a second playtest of the game by the end of the week.