1.Brainstorming
Last week, we made sure our clients’ needs on experience goals, main content, target audience, location of our game, audience’s intended take-aways and emotions. Based on those understanding of the context, we started brainstorming and disccusions this week. Each of us promoted 1~2 ideas. Through the ideas, we discussed our visions of the games’ possible concepts, gameplay, storytelling, user experience journey and AR interaction.
To be more specific, we agreed on:
Basic Gameplay: Scavenger Hunt (AR)
Location: Strip District
Main interaction objects: Linguistic clues like signs
But for the details, we focused on different aspects:
- Tony: A fun “growth” (Gather linguistic signs as resources to run a shop or cat shelter)
- Xixi: A fun “growth” (Gather linguisitc clues about food to run a multi-cuisine restaurant)
- Shen: AR Interaction (Observe the history of the shops through the overlap of AR and real environment)
- Jim: Fragmented puzzle solving (Solve language-related puzzles through a multi-player cooperation between past and now)
- Cora/Yuxin: A series of puzzles for a full storytelling (All puzzles are related and player needs to finish them all for a full storytelling experience)
The discussion was not only a decision making process of the project, but also, from the experience of sharing our focus of different aspects, we had a deeper and more thorough understanding of the possiblility of such kind of AR games.
2.Idea Presentation For Clients
After presenting our ideas and discussing the different directions with our client, we found that he is more fond of a storytelling-focused and a mixture of gameplay of our ideas. Even though, we could not combine all aspects of our ideas since schedule is tight and we are already a bit over-scoped. We would think through all these and try to make a thorough plan by the end of next week to catch the Midterm deadline.
3.Quarter
After presenting our projects to the facaulty, we have the following feedbacks:
Production feedback:
- “Way overscoped”. Needs to clarify with clients whether it is a prototype for future production or a ready-to-launch product. Better do one story very good, instead of do a dozen of unfinished ones.
- Ask librarians for historical archives
- Name problem
- The host of “Strip Show” by PBS knows a lot about Strip District
Design feedback:
- “Whole apple or sliced apple” – Full story VS fragmented story.
- Full story: player needs to collect all items to unlock the full story or recipe, which encourages a high participation and provides with more in-depth storytelling, though players may feel tired and under pressure (is it what we want?)
- Fragmented story: each item equals one story. Player may choose to collect the items he want and leave the rest alone, which leads to a more relaxed and free experience though the storytelling may be more shallow (is it what we want?)
- Items drive story or story drives items.
- There should be interaction feedback to guide player to find the item.
- Items better be more condensed? or not?
- “Why separate the storytelling with the AR interaction? Nobody would read the stories at home” VS “Let players sit down and read the stories”
- Social feature of taking photos is a possibility
Tech feedback:
- How to do AR registeration: suggested Niantic Lightship as a ready-to-go platform for AR
4.Week4 Plan
- Research: reach out to librarian and the others they mentioned.
- Design: discuss based on the feedbacks (on Tuesday) and do a thorough plan.
- Faculty follow up: talk to Dave and Jessie for more feedback.
- Start production: for Wednsday to the rest of week 4, assign the works, set up production roles and pipelines, and everybody starts and get familiar with the cooperation.
- Friday client meeting: talk about quarter feedback, the final ideas and the production plan. May change a little bit but the direction is fixed.