Week 4: Beyond imagination, we playtest

Dave:

“You can spend your whole life designing for a game that never comes, but your time is now. Make the game, make the game.”

Jerry:

So, let’s playtest… and see how players may hack our game like this:

The Week of Change

Since we are going to make one game, it becomes tricky about which game to make. All of our ideas, as high concepts, seen valid and approachable. However, none of the ideas are actually approachable, because we are unclear of what are the actions to do on each platform.

But how do we know what to do, without actually doing it? Or, in an ETC fashion, we will never know what’s right until we play it. If the actions are what we are unclear about, then let’s make/find prototypes to play with the actions.

Phone Actions

What makes mobile phone so unique? We think about gyro scope, touch screen, and the mobility itself.

And we make several prototypes regarding shaking:

1. Shake a box of 2D bricks in different shapes
2. Shake a torchlight to recharge it
3. Shake a bartender’s shaker, to mix cocktails and serve them

These prototypes let us know that

1. Shake a box of things feels fake
2. Shake consists of two parts: movement and rotation.
   • In bartender example, player moves phone up & down to mix, rotates the phone (counter-clockwise) swiftly to serve.
   • When measuring delicate phone rotation and movement, it is hard to differentiate the two actions, as they often co-exist in player’s action
   • When detecting dramatic rotation or movement, the differentiation works a lot better.
3. Shake is fun, and unique experience on Phone.

Virtual Reality Actions

Thanks to Meta who makes a list of XR interaction examples, and saves our effort in prototyping.

Out of all these examples, we feel very intrigued when playing the following scenarios

1. Panel With Manipulation:
   • It let us rotate panels with constrained rotation axis. It feels like ringing a bell or rotate a gear in a machine.
   • It let us slide a panel like picking up a book from shelve
2. Locomotion Example
   • When moving smoothly, blocking the peripheral vision can greatly reduce chance of getting motion sickness.
   • However, suddenly acceleration may still cause motion sickness

What we learned from them are that

1. Constrained object manipulation feels better in VR, both rotation and movement wise.
2. Let’s just use teleport as movement method please.

PC Actions

We played a lot of PC games, lots of them are collaboration games!

We noticed that many games is about moving, jumping and looking around. It is impossible to feel comfort doing these actions on VR, or feel easy on Phone.

So, we playtest the Battleship Game

Do you still remember that, at the end of Week 1, we decide to make a Battleship game? We finally made it playable this week!

So we organized a playtest on Friday (9.19), 3:00PM-5:00PM. We have 3 faculty/staff members and 12 students playtested our game!

We are still organizing playtest feedback, and hopefully will iterate upon them next week.