Step 1:
The three projects that I critiqued were extremely interesting! I got to sit down and talk with people I haven’t had the time to get to know very well yet, and found it super exciting to be able to discover how different everyone’s Final Project ideas were from my own.
The first project which I took a look at belonged to Serene Fan, a very sweet classmate of mine who actually has a rather similar inspiration to her project as my own! She is creating a car-driving simulation on her laptop and getting a real steering wheel for it to be able to work accurately. The key idea that she wants to explore is making driving fun for people. She plans to do this by showing off the importance behind choices- when the people playing her steering wheel video game, they will constantly be given the choices to either steer the car on the left or the right path ( with some of the paths taking people to pink worlds with rains of diamonds, for example). My biggest critique for it was time management, because she said she wanted to code the entire road as moving rather than use a still image, and depending on how long she wants to make the game, the amount of time she spends to code it could be very long…
The second project I took a look at was Daniel Zamiri’s. I was super excited to see what he had though of, since he is a friend of mine, and was extremely surprised when he took the route of “Trying to make people appreciate what they already have.” He wants to do so by measuring people’s heart rate and showing it up on a monitor. My issue with project was that it reminded me a little too much of a hospital, and just the flickering pulse on a screen didn’t exactly express the idea he wanted to convey. I really wasn’t certain how to help him. My suggestion was to perhaps add a very nice warm guitar strum tune once the heart rate starts showing on the screen, to symbolize that being alive is something special, and perhaps adding some positive encouraging words on the screen.
The last project I had the chance to look at belongs to a French gentleman called Tristan. I hadn’t had the chance to speak to him much before, but I liked his idea of creating a musical instrument which took away the difficulty barriers of having to take years to learn how to play it. I liked it a lot! He was having difficulties deciding which notes to permit the instrument to play (full notes or half notes) and I gave him the idea to maybe base the notes around a well-known theme, such as the Mario or Kirby theme songs, and actually give the players something to aim for when the play the instrument. Being able to hit all of the notes properly would make the players feel like they have achieved something!
I do not think we focused as much on the definition of interaction outside of actually reading it from the blog posts, but even in those, it wasn’t explored a lot…
Step 2:
I got a few different points brought up as feedback on my project.
- “It’s going to take a lot of work to make a lot of endings.” – I do agree with this. Making a lot of endings for a roleplay game would be difficult so I will have to be smart with the way I write the script. There are going to be a lot of answers which diverge slightly in paths, but end up leading to the same endings, in order to make the story easier to code, but also more interesting to play through.
- “What is different from this game from what I can download on my Iphone”- I…hmmm, I mean, it’s on a computer. In all seriousness, I do not exactly know. It does have quite a few similarities to Iphone-related roleplay games with the sounds, words and sensory-based decision making…I never thought about it this way
- “Is it based on choosing a character? Do we have to create one?” We never really intended for there to be character customization. There is no gender or name given to the character a player plays, they are just supposed to be themselves, escaping from reality and existing in this other world.
- “Maybe it would function easier with buttons” I did buttons for my Midterm project and was told to perhaps explore sensors, so I wanted to try something new.
I feel like there is a lot of dimensions in which the project could progress, and that both excites and bothers me. The idea of making this project something new, which hasn’t been experienced before gnaws at me, and I wish I knew how I could achieve that. The feedback I received was more curious technical questions than actual feedback, despite this, it showed me how people were thinking, and how players would react to the game in itself.
I believe that I actually need to properly finish writing the script and then beginning to do the coding, to be actually able to fully see and decide how to incorporate the feedback I received from my classmates. I’m really excited for user testing, not just for my project, but for theirs too!