#majorstudio2

In game development, designers usually follow a process called “Cerny Methods” intentionally or unintentionally. Cerny Methods is similar to the idea of MVP (minimum viable product) in product design, which requires a functional low budget prototype to validate if the user would be satisfied or not in a very early stage of development. Cerny Method is a modified version of MVP that it focuses on a “playable” prototype to testify if the gameplay is working.

That is the reason our team abandons the first idea about a meta-game of the buttons since a game focusing on story-telling would require a more completed prototype to go through this process, and like the “Environment” and “Object” projects we only have around 2 weeks to work on it. According to Jenova Chen, the director of the award-winning game Journey, he founded out any of their prototypes for Journey cannot present the idea or the emotion they expected on the players unless they fully polished the game to a certain level.

We switched to a traditional board game quickly so we can put more time on iterating a solid gameplay instead of trying to solving a bug in Unity. And this time we have a new member Radu onboard (Yessss) who is an awesome UX designer. In this play project, I am taking care of the gameplay design, Nick and Radu are focusing on the illustration and digital version of the game. So I will focus more on the gameplay design in this documentation.

The iteration of the basic gameplay is designed by following steps, each iteration I added a layer to the game so it could have more diversity:

1. In the beginning, I was trying to create a simple minimal guessing game - a card is placed in front of the player, and the player has to guess whether this card is black or red.

2. Then, providing meaningful feedback to the player’s choices. This is the process that defining this product really as a “Game” instead of a generic interactive experience. Following the iteration#1, by getting the black card player will get 1 point; getting the red the player would lose 1 health. When the player has x points, claim the victory; when losing y health, the player is defeated. The X and Y require play-test to decide how much it should be.

3. Adding the possibility of “Bluff”, which is one of the core experience of any guessing game. Let another player giving out the puzzle (a card facing down) so the rest of player can use the card giver’s previous behaviors to anticipate his/her next move.

4. Dealing with the situation I assumed that some player will abuse the rule by only giving out red cards during the game. So if other players don’t wanna guess this card, the card giver would take this card by him/herself. By adding this layer, it established a punishment for the players since he/she has to take this card and lose health if no one wants it. At the same time, a player can use this rule to play smart so he can take back his black card by making others believe that is a red one.

5. So far a playable prototype is done! I used memo card and put black and green colors to represent the “good cards” and “bad cards”. By executing playtest I have to solve 2 problems:

 - What are the X and Y should be in the iteration#1? 

 - How many good cards and bad cards should be in the deck? What is the best ratio between these 2?

6. After several playtests, I decided to let the player start with 3 health and the winning condition is 6 points. And I realized that the number of each of the colors could affect the macro level of the progress during a game.

7. After more playtests the deck ended up with 25 black cards and 15 red cards. As long as the game keeps on playing, black cards would be restored as points with the players so the number of black cards in the deck will significantly decrease. Hence the players will meet more red cards when they are approaching the end of the game so they have to be more careful deciding whether they should take a card or not. This mechanism will automatically speed up the overall progress in each one of the games making the game gradually becomes more challenging. This is a crucial requirement in “Flow Theory” that a game can keep its player engaged. Also, by having more black cards than red at the beginning, the players won’t be instantly killed at the early stage so the overall game is more involving and friendly.

Right now we have a stable and balanced gameplay. At the same time, it is still super easy to learn because all you have to do is to make choice should I take this card right now and what color should I give out this round. The points and the health would be recorded by the cards and calculator so the players don’t have to remember extra information but can spend all their attention focusing on guessing and bluffing.

Obviously, it is still not so fun playing with blank cards with a black dot and green dot. We create a story for this game which is “Heros of D12″ that you are actually a student of DT. We want to make fun of the little subculture on this floor and the people working here (because why not). By giving out a card you are “presenting a project” to the others and this project can be good or bad. If it is bad it will hurt your sanity(the health), if it is good the others will learn something from it(the points). And we design 6 professors with different abilities so they can help you once during the game to give you more advantages(actually 7 but Gina and Claudia are always teaching together so unlike the others they are on the same card).

The first project starts with a vague idea of the “environment”, which confused me and my partner Nick for a while. In Schwartzman’s book, I noticed that a lot of installation art projects she mentioned is built for external observations, that even the artist is burying his/her head inside a glass tank or clothes, the audiences are still standing “outside” the product to look at it. What’s “inside” the product, or the content, is always being avoided or just not being served as the main focus in the design. By doing so, artists and designers deconstruct the relationship between the content and environment and narrow down the environment to a tiny, personal level of experience.

Laptop Compubody Sock, 2008, Photo by Becky Stern.

Following Schwartzman’s opinion, I and Nick tried to put the setting of the environment to a current time. Our domain starts with “Mind”, specifically the Alzheimer’s Syndrome (since it is a personal experience and the others usually view it externally). We did a few research on the clinical manifestations on it and found out that a patient’s cognition system is heavily damaged. In an Alzheimers patient’s eye, the world could be another reality, at the same time their responses to such alter reality are perceived by people like us. The discussion is logged here https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yfHWJIfV-ClC1MQ1Yd7L3Hd6OUavAKMwsewp9noE4e0/edit?usp=sharing. (Blue: Ke, Green: Nick)

We were thinking about if there’s a way to make a game and let healthy people understand the world an Alzheimer’s patient lives in, hence raise their awareness of this fatal disease. As an ex-psychology major student, my concern of this idea is that it could be really biased since we are approaching this altered reality with a totally different cognition system. The idea is also being criticized hard in class for lacking narrativity and the solution with a game wasn’t sold. We decided to abort this idea but still focus on the human mind.

Instead of making up a story we tended to use an existing story because it would be more completed and make us to think and design for existing problems than creating our own. Inspired by BBC’s mini-series, Sherlock, we realize by reediting an old story and put it in a new time (like right now or in the future) could be interesting to explore.

In Sherlock, we can see the famous detective from age Victorian is using modern technology to investigate the murder case in the 21st century. 

During our brainstorm process, we decided to use the story from the movie Citizen Kane but transplant it to a near future scenario. What would people think of this billionaire? How would the journalist research the meaning of “Rosebud” in 2040? Our first mission was to review the whole movie and generate the important moments in it. The job checklist and our detailed discussion can be found here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_tvQVPQLkZLiP5kzMs0U3371tIuEiUeOyTYp-VKbYxg/edit

The answer to the idea is straight-forward, as a journalist in the future, he can just dive into Charles Foster Kane’s mind and dig out what Rosebud is. There will be a memory extracting device to construct the virtual world of one’s memory and people can be immersed and walk around in it. The investigation of rosebud could probably be an adventure in a strange, bizarre world of mind.

However, the time is limited since we have only 2 days on it. For fast prototyping the memory device and the world is constructed, we decide to use Cinema4D to quick model the levels and Google Tilt Brush for the details in the world.

The 6 levels represent the significant moment in Kane’s life, including the Xanadu castle, the old house, the Inquirer, his governor campaign speech, his ex-wife and a vault contains his ultimate secret. Since the prototype is made by Tilt Brush, so we can use VR headset to simulate an immersive experience which allows the user to walk around in this virtual world.

Final Pape Draft: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B7Fr4CY_fY2HV0NwUnZ5OFVONFE

This week luckily I discovered Bodymovin add-on for Aftereffects. It basically transforms AE animations into JSON files to be able to use in web projects. So, instead of paper.js, I decided to use after effects animations to use in my projects.

Icons

I created new icons for the demo and narrowed down the whole experience.

After the feedbacks that I have received in class I also create one more animations to give 

Branding

While doing this I also decided to create a visual language for the project as a whole. 

Posters: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B7Fr4CY_fY2Hend2bC0wWmRPSVE

After some experiments about the device to device communication, based on an example I created this functional and more improved mock-up. At this mock up, when the user sends a card from her device it falls to the ground on the second browser. When two cards match in terms of association, it creates a visual feedback. 

In order to create this visual feedback, I started this week to investigate paper.js to be able to use SVG images comfortably. I have a primitive result but I thin even this result is enough to make another user test.

User Test 2

I did my last test with the functional prototype. I got some user feedbacks and I noticed that it is really hard for people to write generated URL from their phone. That's why I decided to change it into QR code and I keep the code on the screen until two players involve in the experiment.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B7Fr4CY_fY2HRzY2Tm1aSkZ4cmMBefore deciding the technical details, first I did a design survey to understand the general approach of the users in terms of learning through diverse media devices and specifically language learning. I asked them their prior experiences about language learning, the difficulties that they faced. At the second part of the survey, I wanted them to answer some Italian word matches based on my learning cards. They all were English speakers and they didn't know any Italian word. Their answers were all correct which showed me the associations that I created are simple enough.

User Test 1

After the survey, I did my first user test with 3 years old Greyson with physical cards. Even though my target user group is the primary school students, the user test with Greyson showed me the association between simple words makes sense for him as well. He gave me the correct answers for each match and as the result of our test he didn't learn a new word but he learned what is bacteria from the combination of bacteria + milk = cheese.

COMMUNICATION FROM DEVICE TO DEVICE WITH WEB SOCKETS

For the engagement prototype, I decided first to focus on to be able to create a functional, device to device communication. I’ve chosen collaborative drawing as a single engagement and tried to implement it with socket.io and p5.js

Local host 1

The first engagement prototype was between two desktop local browser and wasn’t working between mobile and desktop. 

Local Host 2

Second Iteration with Paper.js and Socket.io

Since paper.js has more control over SVG images I wanted to improve drawing experience with paper.js. 

The rest of the week, I improved my concept by deciding main functionality. As the result of my ongoing researches on language learning, I noticed associations are the important part of learning and I wanted to create a playful scenario around word associations as the case study.

Ajit Narayan's word game to communication in every language is very inspirational for me while making research about language learning. He basically creates a schema based on the association between people, objects, verbs and directions and based on this scheme he offers a new language learning model. His ideas become the structure of my idea to create an association based playful experience to learn vocabulary.

Sketches

Based on the idea I created the first visuals to be able to make a user test.

FINAL PAPER OUTLINE

This week after I receiving some feedbacks, I decided to create my experience based on users’ available mobile devices. I narrowed down my concept of language learning and communication. 

TECHNOLOGY PRECEDENTS

ITERATED CONCEPT EXPLANATION

Technology has been revolutionizing the way we live for a few decades. Especially as the use of internet and mobile technologies has dramatically changed our relationship both with each other and everyday life. Today we witness the new definition of socializing, entertainment, learning, creating identities and getting the information on the internet with the excessively use of different kind of mobile devices, especially by the younger generations. They have been redefining our everyday interactivity with the current digital space and creating their own way of communication on it.

 However, since the improvements in technology are faster the ever, we accept them at an equal rate and adapt our behaviors to them rather than adopt our technologies to us. So, when we consider the younger generations, the acceptance of new interactivity is not generating healthy outcomes every time. So what is interactivity and how helpful is in terms of learning? Barker considers interactivity in learning as “a necessary and fundamental mechanism for knowledge acquisition and the development of both cognitive and physical skills. Current thinking about how learning takes place emphasizes the constructivist approach, which argues that learners must actively “construct” knowledge by drawing it out of experiences that have meaning and importance to them [Dewey 1966]. 

Participants in an activity construct their own knowledge by testing ideas and concepts based on prior knowledge and experience, applying them to a new situation, and integrating the new knowledge with pre-existing intellectual constructs; a process familiar to us from real-world situations.