Week 2 is still remote. For this week, we brainstormed different ideas for our project. On Wednesday, we joined a playtest workshop hosted by Mike, which really gave us a lot of useful feedback. Finally, our artists designed many beautiful logos for our team.
Brainstorm:
On Monday and Tuesday, we had team meetings to brainstorm the ideas for our project. Everyone proposed their ideas. Finally, we narrowed down our ideas into two. Here is a short description of these two ideas.
Idea A:
Teach the user how different ML Models and Algorithms works by visualizing these models in 3D environments. The user can interact with these models in several ways. We will try to visualize these models in a more cute and more understandable way. Also, let the player better understand them through some mini-games.
Idea B:
Give the AI different abilities or personalities. Put different AI in one scene and let them work together to achieve a common goal.
After meeting with Ruth, we all agreed that Idea A is more workable. There are three types of Machine Learning methods, which are unsupervised ML, supervised ML, and reinforced ML. We decided to visualize one or two models for each type. We also came up with an example, which is visualizing the K-means clustering algorithm using the planets. The brief idea is planets that guide data collection. Each planet has cities that are within each cluster. The user can see each step of how the K-means algorithm sorts these cities into different planets and interact with the planets in real-time. But there are still many questions we need to further think about. The playtest workshop really helped us.
Playtest Workshop:
On Wednesday, Mike hosted a playtest workshop. During the workshop, each team prepared a Jamboard. We put our inspiration, the user experience, and the client’s needs into the Jamboard. We received a lot of useful feedback from our classmates. This feedback definitely helps us a lot with the design of our game. Here is a summary.
- What is our goal for this project?
- Who is our demographic?
- What model do we want to choose?
- How to visualize MLmodels?
- What interaction do we have?
- How to design the minigame?
Team Logo:
Our artists Leah and Anlan designed many fantastic draft logos for our team. Here are some examples.
Finally, after confirmation from Shirley and Ruth, We decided to use this one as our team logo. Thank you so much for Anlan and Leah‘s hard work.
