This week was all about preparing for the big playtest day on Saturday where kids and their families will come to the ETC in order to test our projects thus far. On Monday, all the teams met, learned, and tested some techniques for how we can improve on our playtesting in preparation for Saturday. We began writing questions for things that we wanted to know about our current build and things that we would be able to improve on.
In preparation for Saturday, we decided to build a physical prototype in our project room that uses the same technology as in the village. We tech already at the ETC and built the tree using cardboard as well as a stand for the computer in the woodshop. This required us to wire up some phidgets as well as remaking the animatic, reorganizing the chapters in the Unity build, and integrate the physical hardware into the Unity build.
As we did this, we also worked on other things for the project that would come in handy for the future. For example, we began noting how things are wired so we could put it in documentation for when we visit the village again. We decided to also reach out to the previous team to see if any of them might have backups of the past pillow tree experience. To our surprise, we were able to get in contact with two of the previous members! They explained that they did but they need to look for it, so we hope to hear back from them soon.
We also decided to make three new background so that once we get alpha frames of the animation, we can begin testing what background colors look good with Buttons, since Buttons is white and therefore the colored lighting might cause Buttons to change colors.
Saturday was a big day for us. Playtest day. We tested with 27 kids and got tons of great feedback! Since we are unable to test constantly at the village, we modified the project so that it could relate the kids not at the village for optimal results and minimal explanation. For example, because we couldn’t get 27 pillows for each child, we got candy bars and replaced the word ‘pillow’ in the script with ‘candy bar’. Another example is during the hide-and-seek portion, rather than mentioning places that you could only fine in the castle of miracles, we replaced them with places you could find in the room, such as under the table and behind the couch cushions (that was the final hiding spot for the candy bars).
It was interesting to test different ages because some danced
While others explained that the dance party felt awkward and needed more direction for the dance party, which was something that we think we are going to be implementing in the near future.
We also need to indicate that they need to hold down the button for a while, otherwise they will only briefly press it.
It was a little hard to test the hug because this was not a family event necessarily; so many children were with friends or strangers.
Some were hear with siblings and hugged, but because some of them were strangers to each other, we let them know that they could hug the squirrels in the room since there was not always someone they “loved a whole lot”.
Overall we got great feedback and will continue to make iterations in the future.