Summary:
This week (Apr.25 – May.1) was our second-to-last week of the semester. We kept iterating visual design on our latest product and achieved significant improvements during the public playtests.
What we have done:
Client Meeting (04.25)
This was our second-to-last client meeting as we started to wrap up for the semester. Our product was reviewed by other DEI members at CMU and received generally positive feedback, regarding gameplay and color themes. It was recommended that we iterate on semantics based on the following guidelines.
Playtest at Ralph’s class and with Scott Stevens (04.26 and 04.27)
We continued to conduct playtest sessions with students, faculty, and staff members after our iterations. Compared to the feedback from three weeks ago, a 40% improvement was seen when rating their understanding the function and purpose of the new seeking activity. The score increased from 2.86 to 4.0 out of 5 (5 means that the activity was considered meaningful and easy to understand). One of the playtesters attended the previous playtest and he commented that our improvement was “crazy” and he enjoyed the current much better.
Scott Stevens is a Research Professor at ETC and Senior Systems Scientist at HCII. He has extensive experience in the areas of games, and augmented and virtual reality for education. He has been involved with multimedia research and development for over forty years. He pointed out some touch feedback was not as sensitive as they should be and some parts of the screen were blocked by UI which negatively interfered with gameplay. These issues have been fixed in this week’s demo.
Ralph’s class 
Playtest with Scott Stevens
Instructor Meeting (04.27)
During our instructor meeting, it was emphasized that visual elements in the introduction and report sections could improve readability. The suggestion was later implemented and shown in this week’s demo.
Public Playtest at ETC (04.29)
Just before the ETC BBQ event (picture attached), we invited around 20 guests for another playtest. We had Amber as our facilitator and received overall positive feedback, despite some individual technical issues.
Project Management
We are on track to wrap up Beta this week and enter the Gold Candidate phase next week (screenshot attached).
Programming
Efforts were made by Shicai to fix a few visual implementation issues. For example, when players click thumbs up, the icon should appear 5x the original size for them to better locate it on the big screen. Jeffrey added thumbs up functionality to automated bots for an easier testing process and interactive word clouds as the report on the big screen. Together with our artists, we achieved huge improvements on the visual design of the introduction and report.
Bigger thumbs up 
Word cloud on big screen
For a complete demo, please watch the demo below.
Art/UI/UX
Some of the UI has been redesigned by Alexa to enhance button press feedback and readability (screenshots attached).
Thanks to Amber, we now have a playful introduction and report section, compared to only texts before (screenshots attached).
What we plan to do:
Next Wednesday, we will be presenting our product and development process throughout the semester. A post-mortem team meeting will take place for us to reflect on what we did well and what we could improve on.
