Week 9 was a slower-paced week for our team, as half of the members traveled to San Francisco to attend GDC. While they were away, the remaining team members—Eva, Zhanqi, and Wendy—focused on foundational tasks essential to ensuring a smooth and successful Playtest Day in Week 10.

Zhanqi continued her work on the forest scene, refining it with a more magical and imaginative design. The goal was to create an environment that sparks students’ creativity and curiosity during their interaction with the tool.

Wendy began developing the Spell Book, a key support tool for players during playtesting. This “cheat sheet” is designed to guide users by showing what types of actions are possible in the game. The intention is to prevent users from feeling overwhelmed by the AI’s open-endedness. The spell book includes example prompts, advice on how to write effective commands, and a list of available objects within the tool.

Meanwhile, Eva focused on the design and structure of the upcoming playtest. She started by articulating our core design principles, defining the foundational concepts that have guided our development so far. This exercise is helping the team solidify and communicate the purpose and vision of our storytelling tool.

To support the planning of Playtest Day, Eva conducted an interview with Dave, who has experience leading original Alice workshops. From this conversation, we gained valuable insights into how Alice is typically used in an educational setting and how we might structure our own playtesting sessions. Dave emphasized the importance of breaking down the experience into sections and connecting story-making from a narrative perspective with story-building through the tool. With this feedback, Eva drafted a basic session structure and ran a trial playtest with classmates, which helped identify a few bugs and highlighted areas for improvement.

Now, as we wait for the rest of the team to return from GDC, we are one step closer to being fully prepared for Playtest Day. The groundwork laid this week puts us in a good position.