TRANSCRIPT: Hello! Welcome to Week 11. A lot of development going on this week, and so what we’ve got to show you may be more eclectic than the previous weeks. Let’s start with what I think is our most fun development: RFID cards!
At the beginning of this week, we had decided to limit how many characters one player could make by linking characters to checksum’d ID codes that we would distribute. This worked alright, but… it was clunky to enter a ID code every time you wanted to check out your character. Well, we have a better solution now! RFID cards.
Our project advisor, Dave Culyba, brought to our attention that the ETC actually possesses many RFID readers and cards. After a brief test with the technology, we found that they were actually the perfect solution to our design woes.
So now, to create a character, a player just needs to tap their ID card on a reader. If a character exists already, they’ll see their information. But if not, then they’ll be guided to create a new character to send into the world and link to their account.
We had a in-house playtest here at the ETC to see how all of that UX flowed. We are quite pleased with the results! Assigning characters to a card seemed to give players a greater sense of ownership over their character, and lowered the burden of checking in on their characters to one satisfying tap. Overall, we are very excited to develop how we will deploy this technology during Festival.
In addition to testing the RFID card user flow, we also were paying careful attention to how players interpreted our UI. And we gleaned plenty of insight on how we should shape our UI moving forward (for one, we swapped the order of role selection and character customization in the character creation user flow). We also occasionally had some confusion in terms of where the player should be looking at any given time, and so we’re beginning to develop more interstitial guiding UI to help players understand where they should look next no matter how familiar they are with character creators from the get-go.
And of course, we now have the beginnings of this wonderful news caster UI! In this screen, we plan to share broader updates about the state of the world. The meta goals of research, construction, emergences, etc. The main design goal we’re pushing on now is giving players a clear reason to return throughout the night of Festival. And hopefully, this will be a part of that!
We also hope to add a simple ‘level-up’ system, to give each player a sense that their character is growing in skill as the night progresses.
So, lots of things! But a lot we’re excited about. Next week will be Softs. We hope to be able to demonstrate the structure and direction and motivation of all of these systems by then. So, until then!
Over and out,
We are the Intergalactic Buttoneers, signing off.