#birgit chmelar

[mdj2017]

Final Steps and MOJO

My last part of finishing the Game was to continue creating videos. I ended up with 4 videos (including already mentioned videos in the last post): The intro with the story, that happened to be a bit too long, a video in which the mole is digging and then leaving into the direction of the village, the video how the fence opens after the clock riddle was solved correctly and the outro with an earthshake and the tunnel and story.

MOJO: we arrived at Taguspark at 9 and began to prepare our “booth”. We provided two laptops, we had the control sheet(s), the poster, and small flyers that were handed over to the player with their own achievements (thanks to my colleagues). 

Luckily we had a good estimation of the duration of one session, so doing one playtest took about 30 minutes. We had about 15 people who tested our game, some of them didn’t finish the game, but in terms of feedback and player sessions the number is not bad in my opinion. We still have to analyze the results and write the final report. 

For me MOJO was a little bit tough. I already made experiences with player testing and user evaluations and knew, that they can be exhausting, luckily one single session does not take too long and in the meantime it was often possible that one of us takes a break. We had a lot of testers after lunch time though, were we conducted one session after another, which led for me personally to shrinking motivation. This could also be the reason because of our decision how we want to test people. We chose to ask them some questions at the beginning, observe them and making notes while the session is running and make a short interview with them afterwards. In retrospection it could be that making a online questionnaire (like google forms) instead of the oral parts would have been a better idea. Our reasons for our decision was that we can discuss more with the player afterwards and ask them more precisely if we don’t understand their answers. Our “strategies” during the sessions were unfortunately a bit different, I preferred to don’t give concrete answers when the player asks something, just enough so he don’t thinks that I am unpolite because I ignore them. On that way I could observe what people are making up when they are trying to solve something. I tried to prevent them to get desperate if they seem to be really stuck though. Overall I am also not sure if I couldn’t have done my job better when observing: I often observed the player and the screen and made notes to everything and probably miss something while making notes. I tried to make as many notes as possible instead of really focusing on the thing that was important for us: the interaction with the pet.

[mdj2017]

Final Phase

We are almost at the end of our work, unfortunately new todos show up all the time, some are smaller, some are bigger. The smaller ones I worked on last week: *finishing the assets on the island *make a better model for the crank of the final riddle instead of just a cylinder *make paths on the textures of the island *improve the texture for the middle of the riddle *... Bigger things I worked on: *adding canvases for videos - intro, outro, mole, fence and start playing the videos at the right time *create the corresponding videos (intro, outro, mole, fence). Right now there is only the mole video and the fence video done (it was really hard to find a good software for video editing...). Althought I am intending to make the fence video again since the assets changed, so it looks also nicer in the video.

This is how the final island will probably look like:

And one frame of the mole digging video:

So my next work will be to create a new fence-opening video - to emphasize that the door opens when the clock riddle is solved correctly. And creating intro and outro video with the images we get from Petras friend Zuzana. 

[mdj2017]

Playtesting Plan. Abilities. Weather.

I was also working on the playtesting plan last week. I wrote the new scenarios in the two documents, the concept and the playtesting plan. We decided to focus on the abilities, so it is also necessary to implement them, thats something else I spent the last week with. There are still a few (small) things missing regarding the abilities, but basically it is possible to use them and they fulfill their purposes. 

I was also working on the weather. Our circle should change the weather accordingly, that is a part of the riddle and a nice feature, that’s why we don’t want to miss it. I had to deal with particle systems and skyboxes in unity to build clouds and rain and night. That requiered also to create assets with photoshop. These are two images that show the result of the weather work:

Unfortunately the ingem weather doesnt look as good as from farther away like in the image.

Currently I am working on fixing things ( :( ) and a few details and adding more assets to the island.

[mdj2017]

Controls Implementation

I was also working on the controls. First I started with the UI, placing the health indicators and the buttons of the abilities, adding code where the functionality of the abilities can be easy added. And adding the inventory including the button of the UI, so that it opens, when the button is pressed. At first it was a little bit hard to align everything and to have the correct structure so that it also scales correctly with the window resolution, but after a while everything worked out.

Next was to add the functionality of collecting items, so there is actually something that can be displayed. Pretty much everything that was regarding the inventory UI was taken from a tutorial, but it was also needed to added items to the scene that can be collected. First I used the tag “interactable” to every object in the scene that will be interactable, later I added also the tag “collectable”, to seperate interactable and collectable items, since they react differently. For both the distance from the character to the object will be checked, objects that are within a certain radius will be highlighted, we distinguish colors of collectable and interactable objects. Also it will be checked if the object is within the view frustum, if there are more objects within the radius than the closest one will be highlighted and the player can interact/collect with it by using “e”.

[mdj2017]

Conceptual Decisions

Like I already mentioned in the last post we did a lot of work already in advance for the submission on the past tuesday. So we could “skip” the workshop with our focusgroup and analyze further what the testing of the low-fi prototype means for us. 

There were again many decisions to make after we observed where people were confused or had troubles or weren’t unhappy. We had lot of feedback and opinions after the testing, so we discussed and incorporates the outcomes into the Concept Document. Besides that I tried to think about the story of the world in which our game takes place to develop the story and our image a little bit further. Unfortunately there are still “holes” in the story but I like where it is going :) 

[mdj2017]

Holidays

I didn’t do anything. We only began to figure out what to do next and if we need a meeting to finish our work for tuesday. Since we did a good job at the last submission we won’t have to do that much for the upcoming submission.

[mdj2017]

Finished Game Concept

The focus group was completed on time, additionaly to the questionnaire that they answered they were asked to answer some questions in an interview to gather opinions on our idea. I recruited four remote people for the focusgroup, two of them are a couple. Having more people in the focus group provides a bigger choice to pick people when they are needed and therefore it's not too bad if some of them don't have time due to their own studies/work or other reasons. They were asked things like about our game idea, games or other things they are associating with what games they like and what they like about it. In my interviews everyone for example mentioned Zelda, but different titles and different contexts. The dark materials was also a book that was mentioned in the interviews. The feedback from the persons were good, the people had different focusses of what they like about the game, for example the animals and especially the wolf in the game. That will be an advantage when testing the game with them so attention is paid also to specific things in the game and not only the game as a whole thing. 

Additionally like the others did I was working on the personas and on the scenarios.

Today we had a meeting with the artist that will work with us and supply us with material regarding our graphic. After talking about what the plans are and what we have to do we splitted the work in the group. I will be responsible for creating an "example" unity project for our prototype and model an island and add some elements someone will find on the island.

[mdj2017]

Game Concept - Lots of thinking, thinking, thinking

 The goal for the upcoming Tuesday is to finish our concept document for the game. We had a lot to discuss together to make decisions about the focus group, game experience goals, core game play loop, etc... The meetings we had took us some time but we could achieve a lot to settle some things.

Besides the group meetings every one of us worked on his own to figure out some similar games and other activities that show some aspects and connections to our game. The first game that came to my mind was Tomb Raider, an popular adventure game in which puzzles and riddles are also an important part of the game. I also tried to come up with non-videogames and other activities, which were only “Digimon” (after we already mentioned Pokemon), room escape games and “Unearth”, an dice placement game thats not released yet. I also tried to make a draft of the stakeholders map for the draft last week, which has to be adapted a little bit till Tuesday.

In the group meetings we were able to decide a lot of things, but we also had to split up some individual work for the document till Tuesday. After we prepared a Questionnaire and sent it to people we know to collect informations about their gaming experience and interests to pick some candidates for our focus group. Everyone of us will have to do an interview with people of the focus group and work on personas and scenarios to finish the document. These individual work part still waits for me.