This week we were finalizing our project. We implemented and fixed some features in our prototype and design documentation according to the feedback we received from soft opening. We also spent time on practicing our final presentation because it was a difficult topic to illustrate, which we reached to faculty and peer students to get advice as well as internal discussions.
This week we had soft openings with faculty members at ETC. We’ve got different feedback from them. Most of faculty thought we did a great job on adding a gameful, entertaining layer to the scientific research tool. They also proposed some ideas that we could improve before the final, such as adding a “surprising” feature beyond their expectation, adding a leaderboard system to make the experience more competitive and fix some user interface design details.
This week we welcomed our client Amy, along with her teammates Celia and Chris to ETC at our project room. We spent two days to discuss our development progress, brainstorm some further design ideas together as well as set up scope for the rest of weeks before the semester ended.
This week we did online google hangout interview with four eyewire experts with different backgrounds. We used Think-Aloud method to let them talk about their thinking process while playing through the prototype. It turns out they have very different experience preferences.
Some comprehended the narrative parts very well, while some didn’t think they were critical to their motivation of play.
This weekend we host a Playtest at ETC.
We designed a live play test system to simulate our web experience.
We printed out the key frames of our core interface, and design some Lego puzzle to simulate the “neuron mapping” process.
The results turn out to be delighted:
This week we finished our half presentation and had a meeting of future steps.
We divided our tasks more specifically and started our scrum session.
For the scope of next week, we want to 1. polish more on our prototype 2. come up with an interactive Mockup of user flow 3. design a user survey for playtesting on Eyewire players 4. come up with a more solid narrative structure to connect the concept between neuron and space.
By attending the UCSF crowdsourcing BD2K (big-data to knowledge), we learnt what other peer developers were doing as well as communicated with them in terms of current problems facing. Directly meeting with our clients in-person also helped us clarify some trust issues and confusions.
We divided our project flow into three phases: Navigation-Lobby-Neuroglancer
– – Diagrams of basic concepts we are going to implement in the next two weeks –
We created a document of Minimum Product to layout the skeleton as priorities as we enter the production period.
We separate our tasks more specifically for each individual to work on, as well as setting milestones for next following weeks until the 1/2 presentation.
Before our demo at GDC (a follow-up session on 24th) with our clients, we will have a playable prototype made.
So far we’ve got 62 participants from Eyewire player survey. After analysis, we found out that most of the expert players were either students or retired people, who played it for the purpose of contribution to science and relaxing. Another interesting fact is that the group separated into either do not play video games at all or very game dedicated people, which indicated ideally we want to produce the game with both easy and difficult levels.
Also we got almost all the participants say “Yes” to join our Neo game playtest in the future.
The survey results help us a lot on shaping our future design. Upon that we further dived into our game design session, we decided to choose a section of the entire game flow to test on the core game mechanism for first prototype.
This week we set up our rough prototype goals and designed the user survey for Eyewire expert players (who have completed at least 500 cubes).
Meanwhile, according to the feedbacks from last week, we did a second around of brainstorming on theme and mood of the game. We decided on the theme as universe/space, and developed a core game system that connect user’s actions in neuroglancer with a overview map on a different page that showing their progress on a bigger scale as well as the status of each cell body as interstellar matters.
