Project Overview
Project Ace Breakers is a faculty-pitched project at the Entertainment Technology Center of Carnegie Mellon University. Our goal is to explore the mixed reality versions of 4-player pickleball (https://usapickleball.org/what-is-pickleball) to find a viable and engaging way to make an technologically-enhanced, embodied interactive gameplay experience.
The First Meeting
We had our first with the project instructor, Jonathan Walton, the first day of this semester. Jerry hosted the meeting and we all introduced our backgrounds and reasons for signing up for the project to the team. In the end, we were all very excited to have a well-balanced team of 5 with clearly defined roles:
Jerry – producer
Valerie – game designer / 3D artist
Chao – game designer / programmer
Aiden – programmer / game designer
Sion – programmer
Play – 2D/3D artist
What we’ve done
Work preparations
We’ve set up a discord server for daily communication. For project management, Jerry established a Trello workspace to keep track of the assigned tasks and progresses.
Research
To better understand the reason for pickleball’s growing popularity, we watched several professional game recordings together on YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jy_PvRFUCyI&t=1516s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=026x9QGiXo4&t=1493s
We noticed several interesting things:
1. The games have quite intense paces,
2. Pickleball is really fun to watch, you get entertained even as audience
3. Singles and doubles feels totally different, games of singles need much more leg works
Comparing with tennis and ping pong, we sorted out the features that make pickleball different:
We’ve then had several brainstorm sessions to talk about the game features we wanted to make and how we can make this game stand out.
Next Steps
For the next week, we will start to playtest the existing VR pickleball & tennis games we’ve found online. We will use them as case studies to better design our own experience. Also, we will further polish the structure of our project to make a better pitch to the faculty during 1/4s.