Week 12
We had a short week with Carnival occurring on Thursday and Friday, but that doesn’t mean that we stopped working!
After ETC Playtest Day, we had a TON of changes to implement (see Week 11 blog) that we started to work on. We also invited faculty to stop by and check out our experience before softs.
On Tuesday night, Dave and Sabrina Culyba stopped by with their daughter Hazel to playtest the experience. Hazel gave us some great feedback and suggestions to improve our experience. She suggested adding in another tree on the left side for the nest to be in (which we already plan to do!), and also adding in some sort of signage for the egg since there is a sign for all the other characters (we didn’t even notice this until she pointed it out – she’s a smart cookie).
Dave and Sabrina suggested that we exaggerate the success animations, with the characters shaking water off of themselves. They were also both confused about the egg/bird interaction, and were unsure how caregivers would explain that interaction to their children. They asked what dialogue we would expect there to be for this interaction. They also asked if there would maybe be some way to save the egg?
On Wednesday morning, Scott Stevens stopped by to try our experience. He suggested to really amp up the audio and use spatialized audio in our final experience to draw the guests’ attention to interactions happening at the edges of the experience. For example, for the egg interaction, for there to be the sound of the nest rustling before the egg falls out, since he did not notice the egg interaction occurring at all. He also suggested making the bunny burrow more obvious. He was also unsure of what to do with the signage, but also stated that if we playtested, and the children understood what the signage was meant for then that was all fine.
Mike Christel and Brenda Harger also stopped by on Wednesday to check out our experience. Mike found the audio cues very powerful, and really liked the carrot popping up sound and the carrot appearing. He found that moment very rewarding. But he wanted more out of the animations, and potentially something happening in the background with the neighborhood since it is stagnant at the moment.
Brenda questioned whether rain could ever be positive? Since animals do typically like the rain. She wanted the experience to show how kindness is not universal, and some characters may want to be in the rain or may not. She wondered if there could be varying levels of complexity for different age groups. We had considered these interactions at the beginning of the semester with our original flower interaction being to provide a flower with both sunlight and rain, but we found that since we couldn’t control entry/exit points for the guest, that this type of interaction did not translate well (see Week 7). If we had more time, we would love to add this layer of depth to the experience.
Our clients, Greg Witt and Rebecca Grabman also stopped by on Wednesday to provide us with some final feedback before softs. They commended us on all the hard work that we’ve been doing this semester and we overall very pleased with our experience. Greg had a few suggestions and requests:
- He wondered if the experience could just start with the umbrella moves? If the idle state can just be raining, then the guest moves the umbrella and the experience starts. Only when the guest has accomplished all the interactions successfully, then the sun will come out. He also wanted us to really define the shelter area of the umbrella by either highlighting where it was covering or completing removing the rain in the distance behind it. But in general, he asked for more contrast between the rain under the umbrella and the rain outside.
- He also asked for a shortcut to be added to easily adjust the height of the umbrella in the digital experience to match the final prop height.
- We also began discussing whether or not it would be possible to have the sound of water hitting the umbrella played through a speaker in the umbrella prop. This would require the sound to start whenever the rain starts in the experience, and to stop when the sun comes out.
On Friday, we demoed our experience with Christine Barnes from Universal Creative. She really enjoyed our experience and also commended us with how far along we are in our project. She encouraged us to think about how we can bring our experience to the next level. She loved the character designs and heart effects, but challenged us to think about how we could improve the signage/replace it. For example, the dog doors start to swing open and shut, a hole appears in the tree for the squirrel, a door appears in the bunny burrow. She also suggested that the feedback should be faster for the end of the experience, so when the birds fly off, the background changes to sunny day at the same time, and the rainbow appears so that the bird interaction has a bigger payoff. She also suggested adding in more dramatic consequences and sad animations like dropping the bone or the carrot when you don’t successfully shelter the dog or bunny.
This week, we got a LOT of great feedback from faculty, clients, and guests. With about one week left to softs, we have plenty to work on, but it all feels pretty feasible to our team. Many suggestions we were already aware of and developing solutions that haven’t implemented yet. Although it was repetitive, getting similar feedback was a good sign to our team because it meant that we were on the right track! We’ll spend the next week implementing fixes to our build before softs.
Until then, be kind,
One Small Act