The focus of this week was our Soft Opening, in which our faculty consultant (John Dessler) came to our project room to experience an official (almost-finalized) playthrough of our project. As reflected in our most recent blog posts, John’s feedback has been essential to our progress in the past few weeks, which was possible because we met with him weekly. Thus, he was already aware of most of our work for softs. However, other faculty members who had not seen our experience visited us as well.
Of note, and somewhat unrelated to Softs, we have a video trailer!
Soft Opening Feedback
The following professors did a playthrough of our experience this week:
- John Dessler
- Mike Christel
- Dave Culyba
- Shirley Saldamarco & Tom Corbett (the only ones to test it together)
- Jesse Schell
We got great insights from all of them. Most of the feedback was related to UI, visuals, and wording – examples include the phrasing of certain information in the cards, improvements for our character photos and dialogue, suggestions on how to make interactions with buttons better, advice on button placement, etc.
Feedback related to printed materials will most likely not be possible for us to implement, given that these designs have already been sent out to print, and a new order might not make it in time for us to deliver the materials to our client. However, suggestions related to the app are definitely something we can implement and/or test. What’s great is that the issues brought up by faculty are such that we can playtest them with anyone – so, we can ask other ETC students to help us with this, just like we did at the initial stage of our playtesting process.
The meetings were also helpful in making us feel more confident about our progress so far and the strength of our project, which has been the design of the experience with all its stages and the goal to be both fun and educational (we were particularly thrilled by Jesse’s comments about how much our work and attention to detail show, given his great expertise in this area!).
Final Tasks!
For the coming week (which is the last one before our final presentation!), our main task is to finish the app by incorporating some of the feedback we got during softs, plus some assets we’re still missing. For instance, we’re having Cali (our voice actress) come again to record the final dialogue and take new photographs, we’re adding the last textured model that we were missing (the engine), and we’re changing certain aspects of the UI.
We’re also waiting for our printed materials and the new tablets purchased by Hosanna House, which will be handed to us to install our app and configure the device to ensure the app’s longevity.
We’re also looking to have a final playtest with children, mostly for documentation purposes (given our target audience hasn’t experienced our app since ETC’s Playtesting Day).
Finally, we must prepare the teacher guide for any teachers taking their students to the Center of Aviation Technology and Training (and thus using our experience), the technical documentation for Hosanna House to maintain the tablets with the app and install the app if they were to purchase new devices, organize our archived material for the ETC, and create our slideshow for the final presentation. Still a lot to do!