Week 5: Paper Prototype and Programming Gold Spike

Following quarters, the team focused on building a paper prototype and creating a programming gold spike this week. 

In order to create a paper prototype, Kat made a first pass at the rules, character sheets, reflection sheets, as well as 8 or so sample “Artifacts” for players to view. At a high level, we want the paper prototype to mirror the team’s experience looking over primary source documents and papers, i.e. capture the feeling of research satisfyingly and in under 20 minutes or so. 

In many ways, the paper prototype resembles a tabletop RPG or even 2D escape room. Specific details such as who you are, why you’re here, what you know at the start of the experience are specifically generated by players before they encounter any primary source documents. We realized that compelling and transformative research occurs when you are most curious/motivated, thus the specific choice to create a “Curiosity phase” before the “Research phase.” 

For this paper prototype we’re focusing on the types of artifacts in the research phase and to what degree players can form cohesive narratives from disparate pieces/sources. Other narrative details such as specific testing site, date, motivation for the player to be there are in very rough stages. 

On the Programming side, Oscar and Shiva implemented some basic functionalities into a WebGL build. In contrast to DTox, we’ll probably want players to have individual screens and talk to each other over Hopin (as opposed to participating in a mass audience with a single central screen a-la the Jackbox games). We also knew that we’d likely scaffold roleplaying with a mad-libs like text sheet, thus meriting 2D UI, text input, etc. Additionally, we knew that we could leverage a large group of players with browser based clients via graphs/data collection using Google Forms/Sheets. This gold spike “networking” implementation will likely be expanded upon if we design player-player mechanics or player-facilitator mechanics. 

For Art, Clare went through the first phase of iterations for the poster and half sheet. Depending on the narrative/playtest results, she’ll be filling out mood boards and art references in the coming week. 

With the instructions, materials (incl. Research phase artifacts), and narrative background, the team plans to hold a few playtests over the weekend, adjust the design of the experience, and translate the paper mechanics to the digital build next week (week 6). Additionally, the team will begin preparations for Halves which happen a week earlier due to the shortened spring semester.