Welcome to Week 9! Due to GDC (Game Developers Conference) and other conferences, several of our team members were not here at the ETC during this week. Thus, we had to adjust our tasks this week accordingly and we chose to focus on playtesting, prototyping, and setting up a framework for documentation. 

AR Moon Colony Playtesting

One of our priorities this week was to playtest our AR Moon Colony experience. In anticipation of playtesting, we implemented the visual feedback mechanics to the experience. Now, when a guest builds a solar panel, the adjacent buildings will light up. When a greenhouse is placed, it will add mini-greenhouses to the adjacent buildings; and, when an engineer office is placed, it will add radar dishes to the adjacent buildings. 

After adding these visual mechanics, we were able to conduct playtesting at the Playtesting Night at Carnegie Mellon University’s Hunt Library. We had five playtesters, consisting of one university faculty member and four Carnegie Mellon students. 

Through our playtesting, we were able to identify areas that needed improvement. Our most important feedback was that it was difficult for people to understand what was happening in our experience. The purpose of the buildings was unclear and the visual feedback was too easily missed. In addition, we also received feedback on how our UI and tool palette could be improved. 

Mission Control

We were also able to work more on Mission Control. Since we plan to divide guests into three separate groups (communications, mechanics, and payloads), we had to make sure that each group’s mini-games were engaging in their own way. Thus, we started by coming up with different ideas for mini-games before quickly prototyping some of them to see how they feel.

For the communication group, we came up with the idea of giving each guest control of a radio antenna (referring to NASA’s Deep Space Network). The guests are tasked with keeping their antenna pointed at the lunar lander to maintain communications with the ground-based mission control. We quickly made an Unity prototype of the mini-game. We found that the mini-game was more interesting with more than one participant, but would become uninteresting if it was repeated for long periods of time. As a result, we are planning to intercut the mini-games with other types of content.

We also played around with the idea of a shape puzzle. Guests would rotate shapes to try and fit them together. At first, we considered using this for the mechanics group, but decided that it may better suit the payloads group instead. We imagined that it could be themed as releasing the payloads from the lander. 

Finally, we were considering having the mechanics group control the lander’s thrusters to guide the lander’s movement. The controls may either use the phone’s gyroscope or use button inputs where each guest in the group is given control of a single thruster.  

Considering Documentation 

We began considering how we should handle our documentation. We came up with a basic outline of the different things that we felt that we might need to include in our documentation. This includes the basic information about our project and the Moonshot Museum as well as art, design, and tech details for each of our three prototypes.

We reviewed the content outline of our documentation with our client to ensure that we are not neglecting any component. 

Review & Looking Ahead

For Week 9, we were able to conduct some helpful playtesting, highlighting areas of our AR Moon Colony that could be improved. We were also able to test out a few potential mini-games for Mission Control and begin outlining what documentation for this project might look like.

However, we are still considering how we can best act on a few pieces of AR Moon Colony feedback. For example, we know that we need to let guests know what individual buildings in the colony do, but we can’t overly rely on standard building forms for the majority of the buildings (due to their lunar environment). Thus, we need to find another solution for this problem.

In Week 10, we have to prepare for Playtesting Day on April 1st. We will prioritize our tasks in consideration of having a new version of AR Moon Colony ready for playtesting. We will also return briefly to Payload Packing to implement the new payloads and consider prototyping/development for Mission Control.