Week 13 – Soft Opening Week

Summary:

This week (Apr.18-24) is the Soft Opening week of all ETC spring projects. Based on the project progress, we are happy to announce that it’s time for Beta!

What we have done:

Client Meeting (04.22)

Our client approved our new implementation of the core gameplay and was genuinely impressed with the progress we made during last weekend. The new gameplay seemed to be more intuitive than the original design.

“This is hugely evolved.”
Ayana Ledford

Instructor Meeting (04.22)

With our successful replacement, we were able to transition into the Beta phase this week after six weeks of Alpha (doubled timeline than planned). Our instructor Mike suggested we focus on iterating the visual design of the big screen and report this week.

Playtest with faculty and staff

For the Soft Opening week, five guests – John Dessler, Brenda Harger, Michael Christel (our instructor), Ricardo Washington, and John Balash – joined us in playtesting our product from Monday through Friday (photos attached). A number of feedbacks were given towards the big screen, introduction, search activity, and the wrap-up report. Apart from a few minor technical problems, most suggestions shed light to how to engage a live audience to build community. For example, invite guests to cheer up/raise up hands/clap when they fall into prompted identities (clap if you love R&B or Pets). We are considering adding similar instructions to the facilitator handbook.

Project Management

Based on Soft Opening’s playtest, our tasks for Beta and future list as follows (screenshots attached).

Programming

This week’s programming progress is reflected mostly with the big screens, tutorial pages, and an automated system for scaled testing (demo attached). We have a scalable system to launch over 300 bots into the game and test the robustness of the server, thanks to Jeffrey and Shicai.