On Nov.9th, we had our playtest day at the ETC. 

We set up our playtest station the way we will install it in the moonshot museum. We had two VR headsets, and we projected one of the visions onto a larger screen so that people other than the two players could also see what’s happening inside the VR headsets. Our target audience are mainly middle school students and also younger children who would visit the museum with their parents or school programs. Many of them have had certain experiences with VR before. During the playtests, we found out that as the children were playing, their parents would stay aside, taking pictures and cheering for their children. Often, the adults would also provide directions for their children as they were playing. This was exactly the goal for this set up. The team wishes the experience to be open for all, including players themselves, observers, anyone in line waiting for their turns, to have a glance of the game, and aiming for a better performance once it’s their turn. 

Throughout the game, we had observed that:

• There was always communication involved. 
• The experience was immersive. Love to see the stars in the sky.
• The later groups succeed much faster, by watching the projection on the screen, because they already had a sense of the gameplay. Players talked about which role to take while waiting and looking at the screen.
• The players were able to recognize how many minerals they collected.
• Everyone was excited that this project is going to be installed at the moonshot museum.
• The parents usually cheered up while playing, by saying “this is on the moon”, children would say that “this is so cool”, feel like actually on the moon, actually moving on the lunar surface.

Though we do have action items to take care of:

• Motion sickness, improve driving mechanics
• The arm: wished to control the arm to move back and forth, instead of just keep pointing forward
• The rover body: more control to the direction, want to have the brake to stop 

Assets updates

We imported the UI frames into the world to see the performance of the potential content that will be shown as instructions.

Start Scene

To-Do

• Art
  • Rover, settlement with texture
  • landscape
  • UI 

• Tech
  • VR: UI

• Sound
  • SFX

• Playtest
  • Moonshot Museum
  • Project consultant