1/4 Walkaround
This week(Jan.31-Feb.6) we had our walkaround meeting with ETC faculty on Monday. We presented our goal and metrics, along with all the research we’ve done so far. We also mentioned that the most likely medium for our experience is a web-based game.
Feedback
Most of the feedback we got focused on several points:
– the project goal seems too vague, they don’t have a clear idea of what we are to build or how our experience tackles the problems we face.
– if we are going to build a game, make it web-based instead of an App. An RPG game might be out of scope
– need to figure out who is our target audience, what transformations do we want to make
During the weekly meeting with Brenda, we concluded that we need to transfer some of the questions to Samira in terms of goal and target audience. We need to keep researching examples of possible deliverables for Samira to choose from. Brenda also suggested that our experience should focus on one feature that traditional platforms don’t have and think about how we can build our experience around that feature.
New Inspirations
We were greatly inspired by some of the fancy HTML5 websites. We thought that one of the most important things for our experience is that it needs to be as visually appealing as possible to make users stick to our experience and explore more. We found that a virtual experience based on HTML5 could be an ideal medium. We can use Unity as our engine and build it into a WebGL version. That said, we won’t have trouble trying to modify our build to fit into different devices and systems.
Client Meeting
Samira told us on Wednesday’s meeting that she wants space where people with different skill sets can work and collaborate together to talk about and try to solve some serious questions that humankind is facing nowadays. She would love to see an experience in which different people play different roles in troubleshooting, and she is excited to see what people can work out with through their multidisciplinary backgrounds and collaboration. And that was why she mentioned ‘RPG game’ last week.
We decided that if the output of our experience is a solution, what kind of interactions are meaningful would really be depending on the topic itself that we want people to talk about. And we will very likely build merely a forum for people to discuss in the end.
We then presented Samira with the virtual museum idea. It will be a web-based virtual experience, in which users can control their avatars in the virtual space and explore all the cool stuff in the museum. We will juice it up with tons of mini-interactions. Also, we wish to further make the virtual museum a platform for other people to fill in their own content so that the experience can be repeated. Samira also agreed that it would be a good starting point for development, and we will keep discussing how to connect people in the museums and get people to talk about the topic.
Prototyping
Having a direction in mind, we then divided tasks for everyone. We hope to have a working prototype by the end of the next week.
Yuki – concept art
Jerry – character control and basic interaction
Peter – game flow
Ash – mood board
Valerie – research and topics
Plan For Next Week
For the next week, we will mostly focus on prototyping. We hope to finish the entrance of the experience and the main hub. We will also keep refining the design document to keep track of our progress.