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:
Overall, our Soft Opening went well! While it was pretty cold outside in the morning, we had pretty good weather for our outdoor experience, considering it was raining during the following days when other teams had their softs. We tried playing indoors a couple of times, hoping that the lobby would be enough open space for the game to work, but we ran into a lot of technical issues indoors (likely due to the accuracy of the ground detection and the presence of walls). After that, we moved outside for all of the remaining sessions, where the build was very stable on the technical side, and our guests could play through the entire experience. For anyone who didn’t want to go outside, we showed the demo video recording above, so they could still provide feedback on our progress.
Synthesizing Feedback
The biggest pieces of feedback and suggestions for improvement can be summarized by three broad categories:
- Historical Context: Players are curious to learn even more about the setting and the historical motivations for their actions in the story. While it is understood that there is a lot of tension between adding in even more content and simultaneously limiting the amount of text on screen to keep it readable, we should find opportunities to fit in as much historical information as possible. Some of it should be optional information on the map, which the player can engage with at will, and the most important pieces should be integrated into the narrative, dialogue, and the players’ actions, which is where the player is paying the most attention. Additionally, some of this context can be provided outside of our application, such as on our project website, or by linking the players to external resources, such as the National Road Museum.
- Making the AR interactions less abstract: For the most part, the current interactions of collecting tolls and smoothing out the dirt to free a wagon feel engaging and satisfying to complete. However, at the moment, they feel somewhat divorced from the historical, real-life actions that someone at the time would take to tend to the National Road. Some players expressed an interest in mapping the road flattening interaction to a more direct action, such as filling holes with rocks, or pushing the wagon out of the mud directly.
- User Experience (improve how easy it is to figure out what to do): Several players feel hesitant or stuck while playing because they do not have an easy or obvious way to know what exactly they should be doing at any given moment. Adding an idle timer to show some instructions, along with updating the quest system and quest log to show more details about the tasks, should address many of the issues in this section.
Build Updates
In preparation for softs and in response to feedback, here are some additional updates and improvements we made to the build this week:
We implemented the animation for one NPC who walks alongside cattle, pulling one along by a rope.
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