Category: Dev Blogs

Overview

• Soft Opening
• Synthesizing Feedback
• Build Updates
• Challenges
• Next Week’s Goals

Soft Opening

On Wednesday, our team had our soft opening session, where faculty members had the opportunity to play through our game experience outside and provide feedback on our progress as well as suggestions for improvements and polishing to do before finals. Here is our demo video recording:

We created an introductory story that gives the player some historical context before they start the game in the tollhouse scene. This went through a couple of iterations so that the art style would fit the historical time period, and we have plans to expand this to a longer introductory scene to provide more historical context.

To address the issue of players sometimes spawning into the scene facing the opposite direction of where the main characters and focal points of the scene are, we updated the transition into AR scenes, so that there is an arrow on the ground prompting the player as to where to stand and what direction they need to look before the scene will spawn. While this is currently still unwieldy and difficult to see because it requires the player to point their phones directly downward, this is a major improvement that solves many of our previous challenges, so we will continue to refine and improve it for the final version.

We created avatars for the NPCs that show up in the dialogue panel.

Finally, we created a 3D model for a mile marker, which we will allow the player to look at and walk around in AR at the end of the experience.

Challenges

The main challenge for this week was picking which feedback from Soft Opening to pursue, and what improvements to prioritize for the rest of the semester, as the final build and final presentation loom just around the corner. We still have some additional content to add in terms of the narrative, and there is a lot of polish needed to make the project as strong as possible. There are some technical issues and bugs that we need to mitigate, primarily making sure that the player cannot get stuck in our experience with no way to proceed other than resetting. Sometimes, this is from flaws in our logic, and when we allow players to switch scenes. Other times, this comes from AR tech errors, where the AR scenes will slide or fly away for no apparent reason. While we believe this is a problem with the Niantic Spatial package and how the ground is being detected, we at least need to mitigate this problem by allowing players to reset where the scene spawns without losing all of their progress. Also, some of the characters look very dark against their background, and we are figuring out ways that we can make them pop out more, especially when the background is very bright, like on a sunny day.

Next Week’s Goals

• Refine the experience design to take into account the feedback from Soft Opening
• Adjust the interactions with the National Road to make them feel more meaningful to the player
• Integrate historical content and finalize the story, so that UI can be created
• Update the quest system to include the player’s goals and better guide them
• Test the newest build at playtest night on main campus

Overview

• ETC Playtest Day
• Gameplay Design Updates
• Artwork & UI Integration
• Dialogue & Historical Content
• Challenges
• Next Steps

ETC Playtest Day

On Saturday, we welcomed several groups of playtesters, including some young children, students ranging from middle school through college, and some ETC faculty, to try out our experience.

We received very valuable feedback from our guests about what worked well in our prototype, and what could be improved. In general, players strongly felt the time period that our app was placing them in, and they were interested in that setting and history. One of our primary areas for improvement is better guiding the player, so they know what their goals are and don’t feel stuck or confused in the scenes when our team is not around to nudge them. We plan to flesh out the game’s quest system and integrate more UI and dialogue that will make the player experience clearer and smoother. Additionally, guests wanted more chances to dive deeper and learn more about the real historical context of the National Road. We had some of that present in our map scene, as players could click on an information icon and see a pop-up with some facts about the toll house building, though we will continue to add even more historical content in order to create a richer experience.

Gameplay Design Updates

In our build at Playtest Day, the player starts out in a scene with the toll house building and a couple of NPCs whom they can talk to, who will inform them of their task, which was to help someone whose wagon got stuck in the mud a little farther down the road. They could smooth out and flatten the road around the traveler’s wagon and then watch it drive away.

After playtesting, we felt that the first scene was not interactive enough, and that talking to the NPCs did not fully take advantage of the setting and historical context of the toll house. Since we had copies of actual historical records relating to the rates of tolls on the National Road from Searights Tollhouse, we designed a new interaction in that scene where several traveling NPCs come one at a time, and the player must charge them the correct toll amount, so that they may proceed. This new scene also showcases the variety in the kinds of travelers along the road, as some travel by foot with cattle, others have a full wagon pulled by horses, and so on.

Additionally, we want our story to tackle how people at the time fixed and developed the road. Often, they paved the roads with wood planks, so we added a third scene in AR that utilizes our existing tree chopping mechanic from earlier in the semester and has the player chop down a couple of trees and hand the logs to an NPC who will convert them to wood planks.

Though we originally wanted to have some kind of scene rendered in AR which takes place in a town, with some more of our Wild West-themed building, we realized that having a whole town was not really enhancing our story, and we could tell a simple and complete narrative just along the roadside near the tollhouse (which in real life is not extremely close to other buildings). This decision also mitigates the issue of players wanting to walk into decorative buildings in AR when all of the interactions are outside, as we will now focus primarily on showing the characters and how they traveled, rather than many life-scale buildings. Having said that, wherever we can (such as in our intro and outro stories that serve as on-boarding and off-boarding of the experience), we will still showcase as much as possible of the history of the development of towns along the National Road.

Artwork & UI Integration

To create more diversity in the characters traveling on the National Road, we now have the animation for cattle walking, along with one NPC who is traveling on foot with some cattle.

We also added UI indicators showing how to interact with the road in order to flatten it, since some players did not immediately understand the interaction purely from reading the dialogue.

Dialogue & Historical Content

One area where we can add a lot of educational and historical information is in our map scene, as players can click on information icons to trigger a “Did You Know?” pop-up connected to specific areas of the map and learn more about the context of this experience outside of the AR scenes and interactions. We have drafts for several of these to integrate around the tollhouse and the road, as well as the design of the pop-ups:

To grapple with the issues surrounding reading on a phone screen—especially outdoors—while still providing an engaging narrative, we simplified the dialogue. We restricted the player character to only having one dialogue option, which makes the dialogue proceed faster and makes the text on screen much more readable. The UI for the dialogue was adjusted to make it easier for the players to see what their character is responding to the NPCs, and we made sure to make each statement in the dialogue concise, so the font could remain bigger. The updated narrative and dialogue options reflect all of these adjustments.

Challenges:

The biggest challenge of the week to tackle was prioritizing the most crucial tasks and making a plan for what changes to make that would be the most impactful for Soft Opening. Additionally, in response to playtesting feedback, we needed to come up with a strong plan regarding how to guide players in AR to perform intended actions and have a smooth user experience. For example, how can we prevent them from walking into the decorative world-scale tollhouse building model? On the tech and user experience design side, we also needed to figure out how to ensure that the terrain shows up in an expected position and that we provided players with smooth transitions in and out of AR.

Next Steps:

• Iterating on our build and delivering intermediate builds before Soft Opening on Wednesday, April 9th
• Stabilizing the spawning of the AR scenes as much as possible
• Integrating more animations and models to make more diverse, unique, and interesting NPCs
• Fleshing out the map with more historical content and making it properly responsive to player’s actions and quests
• Enhancing and polishing the new AR scene of chopping down trees and making wood planks to pave the road
• Adding sound effects and more story elements like a brief slideshow of photos and notes at the beginning that provide context to the experience

Overview

• Updated Game Design
• Playtest Day Build
• Challenges
• Next Week’s Goals

Updated Game Design

To address the issues with how the open area in which we expect players to use our app is not large enough to render an entire town, we have decided to split the experience into multiple AR scenes that each contain a small chunk of the environment. For Playtest Day, we decided to build out one scene at the tollhouse and one that is a refined version of the road flattening and wagon freeing interaction scene that we have been developing for the past couple of weeks. In the future, we plan to add one more scene which is something in the town (still undecided exactly where or what interaction).

To move between the AR scenes, we are creating a non-AR (3D game) view of the town that players can traverse by swiping left and right. There, they can click on NPCs, get additional information and descriptions of the buildings, or go into select AR views for our AR interactions.

Playtest Day Build

We implemented a quest system to keep track of the player’s state and the tasks they have completed, as well as manage the game flow.

Additionally, we implemented a prototype of the non-AR map described in the updated game design, with all of the aforementioned features:

Implementing the map also involved creating a new terrain and layout, as well as the UI icons shown.

The animations for all of the human models have also been fully integrated:

Last but certainly not least, we also have an app icon now!

Challenges

Through playtesting, we have noticed a couple of glaring technical bugs based on how the Niantic package detects where the ground is as well as how the players move their phones around. These largely include the scale of rendered objects not being consistent or accurate, especially getting messed up if there’s an incline (though for the sake of this project, we can choose to only demo and have people play the experience on a flat surface). Sometimes the scene does not spawn where we think the ground is, so we plan to add in a way to preview where the scene will show up before having it spawn. Additionally, we still want to find a way to control whether the player is looking in the correct direction and spawns in a good location in the scene.

Next Week’s Goals

• Synthesize feedback from ETC playtest day and decide on the highest-priority goals to achieve before soft opening and finals week
• Iterate on the current build at least a couple times to get additional playtesting feedback from Mike and other faculty members or students before creating our finalized Softs build

Overview

• Demo
• Art Updates
• Challenges
• Next Week’s Goals

This week, the majority of the team attended Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, but we still made some progress and updated our prototype in preparation for ETC Playtest Day.

Demo

We iterated on last week’s demo for smoothing out the road to free a wagon from the mud, and early this week, we playtested the updated build with Mike and Jonathan.

Overall, the interactions were intuitive and felt satisfying, especially compared to previous iterations. They appreciated our new animations (see below), as characters now wave the player over to catch their attention and prompt the player to initiate dialogue.

Moving forward, the main area to improve upon is adding in guidance for how to complete the quest.

Art Updates

We added in decorative grass textures to both the tollhouse terrain and the terrain for the scene for flattening the road and freeing the wagon.

The human characters now all have rigs (apart from their faces, which need more time to rig for dialogue), as well as waving animations, which have been integrated into the prototype to catch players’ attention and make the scene look more dynamic overall.

Challenges

The main challenge for this week was just making sure we had a clear plan, goals, and schedule to keep making good progress on the project and keep up momentum in spite of GDC.

Next Week’s Goals

• Integrate an additional AR scene using the tollhouse into the build
• Prepare a plan for playtesting and a build for ETC Playtest Day

Overview

• Feedback from Halves & Looking Ahead
• New Design Direction
• Breakthrough: Terrain & New AR Interaction
• Challenges
• Next Week’s Goals

Feedback from Halves & Looking Ahead

In all honesty, our Halves presentation did not go very well. Many faculty members expressed concerns that the current design feels underdeveloped, there is a lack of depth in execution, and there is still a lot to do to deliver a complete and engaging experience.

Going forward and looking toward a strong finish to the semester despite the slower-than-ideal start, we will aim to have a good product for ETC Playtest Day on March 29th, which we can iterate upon and improve for Soft Opening the week of April 7th, and then once again for finals week.

We came up with an updated experience design (detailed below), so for the next couple of weeks, the team will be focused on building out a solid level to test and iterate upon.

New Design Direction

In order to pivot after Halves to a stronger direction, we came up with the following pitch for a gameplay experience:

Overview: The player is someone who grew up traveling west across the National Road during their early adult years. The narrative showcases their memories of their life on the road, with the main experience focusing on when they were passing through a town (based on western Pennsylvania) in the early 1840s.

Changing the player from someone who lives in the town and manages the toll house to a traveler makes it easier to have the characters introduce themselves and more naturally act like strangers because the player character doesn’t know them either (with the exception maybe of the player’s wife/family or horse, for example). In the alternative, we would need to establish some relationship between the NPCs and the player, and it doesn’t make sense that the player has to learn how to do their job that they’ve been doing for many years.

Before the experience (onboarding): The player sees a slideshow or photo book that details some of the history prior to the era of the main gameplay, which is ~1840.

Main gameplay: The player gets to explore a relatively busy town with buildings like a tavern, grocery store, and tollhouse. They are passing through and need to pay their toll, but there is a delay because the tollhouse keeper is sick or busy for some other reason that day. Their goal is to explore the town and help the NPCs, eventually clearing up the holdup at the tollhouse, so they can continue their travels.

Some of the actions/verbs that the players can engage in (we will pick only a couple to focus on):

• Talking with people in the town and learning their stories (narrative quests)
• Chopping trees (or firewood)
• Buying items at the store
• Interacting with animals (feeding, talking)
• Cooking (ingredients in a pot over a fire, smokehouses & smoking meat)
• Picking up objects to move around or give to NPCs
• Fixing a broken-down wagon or helping an injured horse

After the experience (off-boarding): The player will see their character’s remaining memories in a similar fashion to the “before” section. This will cover how the 1850s saw the rise of trains that made the National Road less used, but then with new transportation like bikes and cars, it had some resurgence. We will end on a hopeful note about how the road may not be super busy or crucial to life at the moment, but it is still important to learn about and remember its impact.

Breakthrough: Terrain & New AR Interaction

This week, we prototyped a new interaction that feels far more promising than anything that we have come up with prior, and which thematically fits in with the National Road very well. Using Unity’s built-in terrain system, we can set up an uneven terrain object with a mud-like material and have the player swipe on their screen to smooth out the terrain. This mechanic is very exciting because the interaction makes sense and feels good, and this new terrain looks really good compared to what we had been able to achieve before!

We also implemented some less significant mechanics like allowing players to pick up objects and enforcing a landscape orientation on the phone.

Challenges

This new design direction still comes with its fair share of challenges and limitations to overcome or work around! For one, the due to how Unity’s terrain is set up, a terrain object cannot be rotated. This means it is not very compatible with the current approach of spawning an AR scene in a specific orientation in front of the player. Since the terrain has a specific absolute orientation when spawned (even though it can be translated to a new position or scaled), this means players might spawn facing the wrong way, clipped into objects, etc. We have been brainstorming ways to work around this and have not come up with a solution quite yet, but that is a major priority.

As for limitations with the new design in general, we are at a bit of an awkward place with the amount of open space that we want our experience to be playable within. So far, we have been testing for the game to be playable in open areas that are around 15×20 meters in area. This is a pretty big space to walk around, but at the same time, it is incredibly small when we are talking about simulating a town. We cannot realistically render an entire town in that space; at most, only one building makes sense to be placed in an area that is around the size of the grass lawn outside of the Entertainment Technology Center building.

Next Week’s Goals

• Refine and playtest the new terrain scene and quest for freeing a wagon from the broken road

Overview

• Halves Presentation
• Design Progress
• Playtest Night
• Tree-Chopping Mechanic
• Art & UI Assets
• Challenges
• Next Week’s Goals

Halves Presentation

On Friday, we had our Halves presentation, linked below (we were the first group of the day):

Design Progress

The design that we decided to pursue has three chapters:

1. First, the player begins in a dense forest where they have to cut trees to clear a path, reminiscent of the earliest phases of the National Road, when people who were given land out west contributed to building the road in order to reach their properties. The main mechanic is chopping down trees so that the player and their horse can make it through. The reward for achieving the goal is witnessing the formation of a town along the National Road that the player will continue to foster the development of.
2. After reaching chapter 2, which is the core part of the experience, players become the keeper of a toll house. This phase reflects the point in history at which the road has been mostly constructed and there is frequent commerce and traffic. Their primary goal is to collect tolls to raise money for road maintenance and further development. They can see life-sized animals and wagons passing by and interact with them in the AR view.
3. Eventually, the player is rewarded for their work as the toll house keeper with reaching the final stage of the experience, which is the developed town. They will be able to walk around and have an immersive experience in the 19th century, with more characters and animals moving around that can be interacted with and will teach the player about the stories of the time. The overall experience design was created to emphasize elements that require walking around and looking without extremely complicated mechanics, since this is what AR is best suited for.

For the Halves demo video, we implemented a sample game loop where the player must clear enough trees in front of their horse to create a path, and they succeed when the horse crosses the entire area:

Playtest Night

In preparation for the Halves presentation, we tested an updated build earlier this week to get more feedback on how the tree-chopping interaction felt. Compared to what we had last week, the additional particle effects and sound effects were a great addition, and players enjoyed using the tap interaction (with the axe) to chop down trees. The swiping interaction needs more polish.

Also, players wanted a clear, larger goal for the game. Right now, with only the scene for chopping trees, it felt like there were too many trees that required too much effort to chop, and they did not want to play for an extended amount of time.

Tree-Chopping Mechanic

Here is an up-close look at the updated tree chopping interactions and the added particle effects:

Art & UI Assets

From our previous prototypes, we had seen that trying to render the dirt road using a material on the ground meshes generated by Niantic’s spatial platform resulted in a very choppy and broken-looking ground, which looked more like broken wood than dirt. This week, we created a new dirt material that we could render onto a flat plane, which we could position onto the ground based on the positions of the (now invisible) semantic layer meshes. This new material uses a position-based shader to generate depth and a textured appearance.

We now also have models and textures for the tools needed to chop the trees.

For the UI, we have created a draft introductory panel based on an old newspaper, as well as gesture prompts showing how to chop trees. The gesture prompts were drawn with work gloves on as to not be exclusionary of any race of gender.

Challenges

The challenges for this week were largely just putting together a coherent demo and presentation that effectively showed our efforts up until this point in the semester and that incorporated everyone’s work. As it’s still winter, we also had to work around the weather quite a bit this week when testing and recording demos.

Next Week’s Goals

• Process feedback from Halves presentation and determine goals for the rest of the second half of the semester accordingly

Overview

• Prototypes
• Playtest Night
• Challenges
• Next Week’s Goals

Prototypes

The focus for this week was prototyping playable mechanics for playtest night in Weeks 6 and 7 leading up to Halves. On the backend, we first implemented manager scripts that manage the input processing on the phone, keeping track of when the player taps on the screen, as well as what kind of action they performed (a tap vs. a swipe).

As we moved away from the toll collecting mechanic from last week, the next gameplay mechanic that we prototyped was chopping down trees, which we wanted to allow players to do either by tapping (with an axe) or by swiping (with a saw). We implemented a working version of the prototype as well as a small demo scene that could be shown at playtest night.

We kept the dialogue system and wrote some test dialogue for the horse, as well as dialogue options that the player could choose in response. At the current stage of what we have, one interesting story direction that we want to follow is the idea of animals being treated differently than people (and being valued very highly) on the National Road. Our sample dialogue in our demo scene has the horse reflect on their comfortable sleeping conditions, while the human NPC talks about how stuffy and cramped is it when they stay at an inn or tavern along the road.

Finally, we made some improvements to the mechanic from last week of spawning an AR scene on top of the ground, based on the amount of ground that is actually detected in front of the player, and we assembled a sample town scene with the Wild West asset bundle buildings and some wagons that the player could explore.

Playtest Night

We attended playtest night on Tuesday, where we showed our three demo scenes to players and had them try out all three core mechanics. From this session, we learned that players enjoyed the interaction of tapping to chop the trees, and they also thought the animation of the horse talking was entertaining. However, the dialogue was too long, making it difficult to read, and the interactions needed more visual feedback to be properly communicated.

Challenges

While the mechanics that we have implemented are functioning, they both have a lot of limitations and need to be strongly improved upon, especially visually. When rendering the big scene with many buildings outside, if there are other buildings or trees around, like in the area right in front of Hunt Library, the in-game environment will suffer from a lot of clipping due to occlusion. For the tree chopping scene, building for a mobile device means we are severely limited in the number of high-poly trees with branches that we can render. At the moment, players can look up and see that they are chopping down a lot of bare logs that are filling the space in a supposed thick forest.

Going into the week of halves, we also still have a lot to do ahead of us in terms of narrowing down a very specific direction and vision for what this project will become in the second half of the semester, and it has been challenging so far for us to find a path that seems particularly promising as an engaging and functioning experience that meets the project goals.

Next Week’s Goals

• Iterate upon and refine a build for playtest night on main campus again next week
• Polish a build, gameplay demo video, and slideshow for Halves presentation

Overview

• Searights Tollhouse Visit
• Experience Design
• Tech Updates
• Design Production
• Challenges
• Next Week’s Goals

Searights Tollhouse Visit

On Monday, we visited Searights Tollhouse, the same location as our 3D model from the Portals Project. We got to learn about how the tollhouse keepers lived and worked in that building, how they kept records, and some fun facts about the building and the National Road in general!

Experience Design

This week, we focused on developing some narrative for our experience based around the tollhouse, since we have the realistic model for it.

We met with both Carl Rosendahl and Chris Klug this week to discuss constraints and effective AR design and narrative design, respectively. The biggest piece of advice we received was to define very tight constraints that we should follow, given how open-ended our project requirements are, as well as to lean into the fact that this is still a fictional experience rather than trying to make everything look extremely realistic if that is too difficult.

We thought one engaging interaction that people would find entertaining is if they could talk to the horse, so along with the rigging for the horse being done this week, we also have an animation for the horse’s dialogue.

Tech Updates

Building off some interactions that we came up with last week, we began to build some prototypes for a couple mechanics that we can focus the gameplay experience around.

For this week, we focused on using Niantic’s object detection to allow players to collect tolls from real-world objects like cars or other people. At this point, the mechanic of collecting tolls is still not very convincing as being particularly engaging, and there is also a major drawback with the AR package, which is that the object detection has no way of keeping track if you have already seen a specific object once it has left the frame and come back in. As a result, the player could theoretically keep looking away and looking back at the same object to infinitely collect tolls.

Due to these issues—and also because we don’t want to encourage the player walking on an actual road with lots of cars or people while playing—we decided that any toll collection mechanics that we pursue should be limited to in-game characters, where we can better control the states, perhaps with some extra easter egg mechanic of collecting tolls from other people who walk in frame only if time permits.

The other major mechanic that was integrated this week was the ability to render a large rectangular environment on the road, in the direction of the actual ground detected during gameplay, and ensuring that there is enough unobstructed ground (at least a set minimum length and width) in whatever open area the player’s phone is pointing before the environment is spawned. This was a challenge because Niantic’s package does not automatically provide the data about the orientation of meshes being generated on the detected ground layer. As a result, we had to create a backend system that finds the mesh objects and uses a principal component analysis (PCA) technique to find the primary direction of the road and then calculate the length and width along that axis.

We also implemented a flexible dialogue system using the Ink Package for Unity, which will allow our narrative designer and programmers to easily collaborate on adding in dialogue that interacts heavily with the in-game functions.

Design Production

This week, we finalized our poster, half-sheet, team logo, and team photo!

Challenges

The main challenges for this week were working within the constraints of the Niantic Spatial Package, as detailed above, in implementing the mechanics that we need in order to properly render a scene in a way that looks good and then build gameplay on top of that. Having overcome some of these issues, we can start creating playable builds for next week and start receiving playtesting feedback.

Next Week’s Goals

• Attend Tuesday’s playtest night on main campus and have a playable build that lets us receive feedback on our current system and interactions
• Improve the rendering of the scene in AR based on where the player is standing and where the road is

Overview

• 3D Models
• Tech Demo
• Challenges
• Next Week’s Goals

3D Models

This week, we gained access to many of the 3D models that we will utilize in our project. This includes the scan of Searights Tollhouse from the Portals Project, as well as a Wild West-themed asset bundle that includes some human characters, horses, wagons, and contemporary buildings from the era of the National Road.

Our artists will be focusing their efforts on arranging a layout of these buildings, as well as rigging and animating them for our app design. They will also be working on creating realistic textures for the road at different stages of history, UI and other 2D art for in-game interactions, and visual effects to enhance the experience.

Tech Demo

With the new models ready to test out, our programmers began creating prototypes, testing out spawning objects and having them move around on the ground in an AR scene.

One challenge that we needed to overcome was that most of the tutorials and demos available online showing how to set up an AR scene with Niantic’s package show how to detect the ground and then have the user manually spawn in objects (usually by throwing them into the scene). However, this approach does not work for our project, since we want to have more complex scenes that exist on their own without player input.

We were able to build a prototype that uses the location of the Niantic semantic layer meshes in the scene to place objects on the ground without the user needing to click on the screen or do anything, and this foundation will let us build up more complex prefabs that can contain all the objects that will spawn on the ground around the player and that the player can interact with.

Challenges

As mentioned above, a major challenge for this week was taking our tech exploration with the Niantic Spatial Platform and converting what we learned into a demo that would be useful for our project, one where objects can be placed on the ground using Niantic’s semantic layer data automatically, without any user input, so that we could spawn more complex scenes and environments around the player

Next Week’s Goals

• Field trip to Searights Tollhouse
• Meet with subject matter experts Carl Rosendahl (Distinguished Professor of Practice and the Director of ETC’s Silicon Valley campus, who has a lot of experience with VR and AR startup projects) and Chris Klug (ETC faculty, extensive narrative and tabletop design experience) to seek their advice
• Build prototypes for AR interactions that we designed and create a demo that can be tested at the IDeATe/ETC weekly Playtest Night on main campus
• Finalize in-progress team promo material including the team logo, half-sheet, poster, and team photo

Overview

• Quarters Walkaround
• Synthesizing Feedback
• Challenges
• Next Week’s Goals

Quarters Walkaround

In preparation for our Quarters Walkaround on Wednesday, we came up with two distinct directions that our project could go in, which we wanted to receive feedback on. One is an indoor tabletop experience, which is very flexible to be played almost anywhere, and allows us to imbue our product with significantly more narrative and educational design. The second is a fully outdoor experience, which takes advantage of the Niantic Spatial platform in a way that the first does not require, and which has the benefit of making the player feel more immersed in the environment, as if they are actually in the scene, and provides a sense of scale and awe.

Going into Quarters, one thing we were sure about was that we needed to manage scope and we didn’t want to do essentially 2 projects at once. In other words, we will need to pick one of the two directions to commit to. We should think about ways to simplify both versions, such as using pre-built, realistic 3D assets in the outdoor version. Another element to consider is the players’ motivation for caring about developing the road. One possible design decision is to make the player take on the role of a tollhouse keeper to become more invested.

For our experience and potentially transformational goals, we thought about how educators could use this app or game either before or after field trips to sites like the National Road Museum to get kids more interested or keep them interested in the National Road and related historical topics.

Synthesizing Feedback

After Quarters, we organized the feedback from each group into an affinity diagram to pull out the most common sentiments.

The questions and areas to focus on that we got from the experience can be summarized by 4 general categories:

1. Scope: One location is definitely better than trying to do multiple, and we should aim for a vertical slice. Different faculty had different preferences and opinions on whether an indoor or outdoor experience would be more successful.
2. Enjoyment/Value for the Audience: How will our experience be fun for teens in our target audience who have no prior familiarity with the National Road? What is fun and interesting in general about what we are designing?
3. AR/Technology: What does AR give us that other platforms can’t achieve? How do we balance making something that shows off the tech with something that is actually fun for our audience?
4. Location/Context: Is it actually beneficial for this experience to work from anywhere? Where should our audience play this? Should it be part of a bigger educational activity (like a road trip or visit to the National Road Museum)?

In our instructor meeting we discussed how to take this feedback and move forward, so that we could begin creating prototypes and playable builds as soon as possible.

We need to further explore the capabilities of AR technology, since this project was pitched to be an AR experience, so it’s a given that we will use AR and cannot change that component. The rationale for choosing AR was the opportunity to provide movement and interaction to old-school, static dioramas in the museum.

As for the location, our decision to make this experience playable anywhere makes sense because very few people know what the National Road is, and we want this to be a tool that can introduce them to it. If we made a tabletop experience, we would need to really land the gameplay and create something unique and innovative in order to have a successful project that meets our goals, as we would be cutting out a big piece of the pitch if we didn’t use Niantic’s semantic layer detection outside.

On the enjoyment and audience value side, having a narrative will be a lot more difficult and not work as well if we choose the direction of an outdoor experience, but we want to start with narrowing down our player experience goal and deciding what we want the player to feel. As inspiration, we looked at the Oregon Trail tabletop game, where a large aspect of that game is intentional frustration, and the game successfully achieves its emotional and experiential goals.

Ultimately, we decided to pursue an experience that is played outdoors, so that we continue to use the Niantic Spatial Platform, which was a big aspect of the original pitch, and that we could lean into the ways that life-scale immersive environments could be an interesting medium for an interactive experience.

Challenges

The biggest challenge for this week was committing to a design direction that we felt most aligned with our project and personal goals, balancing the possible risks and benefits of each version of our design, as well as which we felt we would learn the most from pursuing.

Next Week’s Goals

• Create several tech probes that show possible interactions and just rendering a scene in general. Start incorporating visuals from the artists and see what’s actually exciting in this space
• Follow up with Portals Project team to meet and get models for Searights Tollhouse and other buildings
• Make progress in anticipation for halves on the art, programming, and historical research sides