Bon Appétit! We have finally started treading through an AR garden (salad). Our product is growing thanks to some amazing paper prototypes that pushed our visions to reality.
Following the difficulties the programmers were having on the tech side while simultaneously trying to implement prototype ideas and just learn how Lens Studio works in general, the team took a step back this week. Instead of trying to playtest our ideas with the Spectacles, we focused first on making paper prototypes that we could play together around the table.
We first tried out the drink decorating idea. We grabbed a stack of styrofoam cups, gave each one a prompt, and saw what each person would draw as a decoration in response. At the end, the original person whom the cup belonged to would have a moment of surprise at the reveal. We found that this point at the end of the experience had a lot of energy and enthusiasm from the team, but the process of actually decorating each cup was painfully silent.
We then tried modifying the concept. What if we combined decorating drinks with the party game Impostor? Everyone would get the same secret word as their prompt except for one player (who instead gets a broader word to guide them). Players would take turns adding a decoration to the drink that aligns with their prompt, in the hopes of convincing everyone else that they are not the impostor, while also ideally not obviously giving away the word to whoever the impostor is. This version felt better than the first drink decorating prototype because each person’s turn was shorter, and there was some dialogue in response to each person’s turn, but it still didn’t feel right to us.
After spending time brainstorming more, our game designer came up with a party game to try, which involved us trying to make a pizza together, where only one player is given a recipe and cannot directly tell us what toppings to add, similar to games like Taboo. Each of the other players has a random assortment of ingredients in front of them, so no one person has all of the correct items. It’s possible that multiple people might both have the correct thing, or that two people have similar ingredients that could get easily confused.
We quickly made a paper to test out, and the difference was astonishing. We needed to talk to each other constantly to properly coordinate, from the chef giving clues to the other players communicating about who would add an ingredient they believed was correct. At the end, when the recipe was revealed and we saw who had added what, we would argue about conflicting interpretations of a clue or about which clues were absolutely horrendous. “What do you mean you don’t think spinach has any taste?!”
We still had ideas about tying interactions to physical objects at the table, such as trying to roll out the dough and adjust the pizza size by spinning the lazy susan. For now, those ideas were tabled because we are still not sure if that is going to be possible with the technology, though our programmers will keep trying. For now, we are thinking that any object tied to an image marker will be purely visual, and we decided to switch from a pizza to a pot of soup, so we could use the amazing soup shader that our artist has been developing.
With the success of the playtests of this concept within the team and with our friends, the energy was electric, and with new excitement fueling the team, we all set off to dig deeper into our respective roles and figure out how to bring this vision to life.
Our UI/UX designer translated our brainstorming and paper prototyping into a gameplay flow for the players. Then, the flow was broken down into components to create a detailed table for internal use, outlining what assets and contributions from each team member’s discipline would be involved in building out each portion of the experience.
Going back to the digital prototype, we worked on addressing persistent issues of unpredictable spawn locations for synced objects. Looking at what other published lenses have done, we are now beginning our experience by having players move the digital objects and align them with the table, confirming the position of everything first before interacting.
Last but certainly not least, this week, we finalized our design production materials! The final poster, half-sheet, and team photo are on the Media page of our website, and our logo and wordmark are in the website’s header and footer. Our visual identity has been going through many iterations over the past few weeks, as we experimented with different styles and color palettes. We’re very proud of the visual branding that we’ve settled on, and we’re excited to show it off when we get the printouts.
