Week 4: Get started!
Hi everyone, this’s Week 4! We have our first prototype to show you this week!
Game design!
Before the first game demo, there must be a game design! We got inspiration from both Math Walks and the math book Lou lend to us. Kat did the game design wireframe for it. Check this out! Or you can check the demo below if you want.
Game demo!
Base on the game design, our programmers made the first game demo, and we used it to playtest with kids on Sunday. We will have the background story, environment and the animated character set up later.
Branding!
This week, we also finished the logo and poster design. What do you think! Leave comments below you have anything to say!
Team bonding!
We also had our team bonding meal before the playtest at Hofbräuhaus and took our Team Photo there!
Playtest!
We only got 2 kids to playtest our game unfortunately, but we still had Lou, Tech Playground staff and some of the ETC classmates joined us.
In the playtest we found that kids loved looking up and down through their phone to find anything interesting. They got excited after making a cube and they loved physically involving in the game, such as dragging the faces and forming the cube. Though we designed it as a game can be played on desk, but people tended to move around and see the cube clearer in 3d space.
We also met a lot problems:
| Problem | Solution: |
| Players don’t know they can drag or how to drag faces | Tutorial for the first face Show the folding animation for one face (3D hand and arrow animation) => Force them to tap the face (highlight the face) => when the user taps and drag, the animation disappears. |
| Player move around with the phone and play but the cube surface moving logic is wrong | Object detect the direction the player is and the logic rotates accordingly |
| Face turning around for too much degree in the backward direction |
Tech – limit the direction; UI – text on the phone “try another direction!”; Alt solution: shader + vibration |
| After successfully snapping, no feedback | Tech(particle effect) + Art (2d sprite) + Sound (chime sound): particles finishing the cube – bigger reward: Bigger particle effects with sound and lines from Character, cube turns into present with bow |
| User covers the rear camera | Tech – detect the covering; UI – text on the phone |
| Playtesters didn’t like the static chinchilla | Add chinchilla animations |
The first four problems were the most important problems we had. We headed to solve these four first next week. Let’s see what we have in next blog then!