The highlight of this week was the ETC Soft Opening on Thursday, held from 10:00 AM to 3:00 PM. During this event, ETC faculty visited our project room to playtest our experiences and provide valuable critiques and feedback. The day before, we had a client meeting to reflect on our March 29th playtest (Week 10) and review our development progress. With only two weeks remaining in the semester, we are focused on wrapping up and delivering the strongest version of our project possible.
Development
By the Soft Opening on Thursday, we had made several updates to our experiences.
Art
We added the car seats to the scene and improved the environment quality outside the car, such as the road. The in-car perception felt more realistic and natural thanks to these changes.
Programming
For both the geyser and the bison experiences, we switched the multiplayer solution from SharePlay to the Firebase server. Because of that, the onboarding became much easier, and players only needed to choose which direction they were facing while sitting in the car.
Moreover, we added a time countdown to the geyser experience so that players need to tap their fingers together at the same time to set off the geyser.
At the same time, the bison experience was also ready for playtesting. Players need to feed the bison with the right type of food from the food basket. If they feed the wrong food, the bison will bellow, and a voice-over will play and remind the player that the bison does not like this food.
The overall experience playtested during the Soft Opening is shown in this video.
Soft Opening
Here are some photos from the Soft Opening.
Critiques
The ETC faculty gave us many constructive and helpful feedback on what we had done well and what we would need to improve. Here is an overview of what we did well. They liked how the bison was approaching the car, and it felt magnificent and stunning watching the bison getting closer. Another faculty member mentioned that sitting face-to-face felt like sitting in a future car. We asked every faculty member that if they thought our experience could be relevant to their family road trips. Most of them answered yes, and they thought the experience had the potential to become prevalent in the future.
However, besides the things that went well, we also received many critiques that we would need to consider and improve upon. Here is an overview of the things that did not go well enough. First of all, our experience did not have a very understandable flow pace. Players sometimes got confused or lost about what they needed to do because all the information was in the voice-over. If they missed the voice-over, they had no idea what to do next. Even though they heard what they were supposed to do next, they did not understand what that action meant. For example, when they heard tapping fingers together to set off the geyser, they did not know how to tap fingers together, tapping their own fingers or each other’s fingers. Moreover, a couple of faculty members discussed that tapping fingers did not feel like it was related to setting off a geyser. It was not the fitting action to capture the feeling of a geyser eruption, without any tension and pressure involved. Finally, they expected our experience to have more social interactions among passengers rather than a passive educational storytelling, so that it could truly connect the family members and make the experience memorable.
Plan
We discussed a few possible solutions to address the above issues and to make the experience more interesting and engaging. For example, we planned to change the tapping finger action to clapping hands to capture the feeling of accumulating the heat and pressure to set off the geyser. However, due to the timeline of the project, we might not be able to address all of these issues brought up by the Soft Opening.