Project 4 reading journals

Week 11 Nov.4.2019

The first reading during our AR project development started with the topic of Play and types of players. Which are both very interesting ideas that we need to constantly think about as game makers. The author helped us to break each topic down into lists and give each single type/category a definition, which is helpful information that are worthy to remember for the future. And this section of the reading makes me started to think about our project, about the concept of Play within it, and what type of player might enjoy playing this game.

When we first know we are going to make an AR game, we decided to start with a simple concept and saved our time and energy for the technical part of the development since none of us have the experience playing and making any AR game before this project. We didn’t know if this was the right approach when we first started. The only thing we know is based on the experience we had last semester when we also worked together on a VR project. Back them we started with ambitious goals that contains a complex concept for the game. But the reality of having limited knowledge and technique to conquer the technical aspect of the game in a short period of time led us to make compromises at the end. So when this project first started, all of us agreed on making a game based on a simple concept but fun to play.

For this project, we started with one of our teammates's vision of making a game that asks players to chase chickens.  While playing the game, players need to get up and run around within the play area physically and try to get the chicken back to their coop/living place. It is a really simple concept that none of us could describe it with more than one sentence because it is just that straight forward. And after the development and received some feedback from our players, it was clear to us that this is a good idea and people were having fun while playing the game. And for me, I believe the aspect of play within the game that produce the emotion of having fun is strongly tides with the feature of running around physically. 

There is an enormous amount of fun from moving from point A to point B by running. For me, the very first experience of play came from my childhood memories of making physical game with kids I knew from my community. My generation was born right before smartphones and tablets became popular. We also don’t have access to any gaming console or PC due to the traditional idea of how they would cause bad influence throughout our early development. Back then our main way of entertainment and socializing with those who have the same age as us was through sports and physical games. I remember we used to assemble right after school or dinner and just do things like soccer and hide and seek for 2-3 hours until our parents called out our names from our balcony and tell us to go home. I remember we had this special rules of hide and seek that utilized our 35-floored apartment building as the playground. It requires a 6-12 years old to climb (sometimes run depends on the situation) Dozens of layers of stairs within an hour or two during the playtime. It is a funny thing for me to think about now, but I’m pretty sure I was having fun during the time. Otherwise I won’t spend so much time stuck with a dozen kids inside a hot staircase in those Southern summer night, and learned how to walk like a Ninja so I won’t triggered the light and get myself spotted by the catchers. 

 Although players don’t need to climb any stairs for this chicken game, but I think the similarity between this game and my childhood hide and seek experience. And I think the fun and play within these two cases is strongly connected with the idea of physically involved and participate with the activity that is called as a game. Now looking back to our concept, the players play a competition between catcher and runner with the chickens. The play concludes itself when the player successfully chase all the chickens back to their coop, and winning the competition provides the natural feeling of joy and achievement to the player, make the game an enjoyable experience for them. And as a way to ensure this happens as quickly and frequently as possible, we need to make sure the game is really easy to play at the beginning. And that is the reason why we want to include a difficulty curve into the game for our future plans. 

But does physical involvement really a necessary factor for our game? What is its role within the play and how does it influence the overall experience? This is a question I still need to think and research about in the future.

Week 13 Nov.18.2019

This week’s reading is an article written by Barbara PM on Black Shell Media. The focus of the Article is about the importance of Usability Testing in Game development for Indie Devs. It talks about why users are important for developers and provides a few testing methods and examples of questionnaire. 

The importance of having your game test by players throughout the development is definitely not a strange topic for us. Doing playtest with people we know or don’t know can provide many useful insights to us about our game. Whether those feedback are something we have an understanding or not, they would help us to review our concept and method, and further build the game based on what we’ve learned and make it a better experience to our players. 

At the beginning of the article we received an example of making a questionnaire and ask the players to answer them before they play the game. The questions and the answers could help us understand more about our players and serves as a useful information for future developments. After reading the article, we made a questionnaire for our game based on the example we got from the article as a practice. We were planning to give players this questionnaire during our playtest event so we could have a basic understanding of this method of playtest and interaction with players. The questionnaire contains questions such as:

• First and Last Name- basic personal information
• Age- same as above
• Email Address- for possible future contact
• Gender- also basic personal information. However, this might be a question that someone might consider as “too personal” to answer. In order to not offend any of our players, here are our options:
• Male
• Female
• Other- Which I’m nor really sure if it's really appropriate…
• Prefer not to say

Since we value our players and their opinion, we were trying to be very respectful while we were making the questionnaire. 

• Age- Personal information, we were trying to find an average age group that are interested in our game or the type/genre of games that we are making.
• How often do you play games- this help us to learn player’s personal play habits. It could also show a really basic layer of how much the player might know about play and games in general.
• What types of games you like to play- same as last question, it provides additional information about player’s interest and play habits.
• Do you play mobile games or are you interested in playing mobile games?

-Since we are making a mobile game, we want to see how popular or well known this     platform is within the number of players we had and use it to make an assumption for a broader population. This is just a practice since smartphone and mobile games are really popular within the US and around the world, but it could be used to research on other gaming platform and other forms of games.

• Have you had the chance to experience Augmented Reality(AR) at all- Similar as last question, it helps us to research on the type/form/genre of the game that we were working on. Also, since AR is still a really new or even strange idea for many people, we hope this question could bring up some attention or interest for them on our game.
• If yes, what AR game was it and on what device- Since this is the first time for us to work on an AR game, we still have very limited knowledge on this type of game. This question could help us to learn more AR games- which one of them are popular beside those we know, and what could we learn from them to make our game better.
• Do you like games that involve physical movement to a degree(Example: Wii Sports)- The concept of our game require players to actively move around while they are playing. We want to see the general reaction from our player about this concept and maybe adjust the concept based on the feedback we receive. We provide an example of Wii sports to give them a reference when they are making their answers.  

Besides using questionnaire as a way to get more information about our players, the article also talks about a method of playtesting-- Guerilla Testing. Guerilla Testing require the developer to bring their prototype of game to public areas such as cafes and ask people within this area to play their game and receive feedback from them. It is a useful method for receiving feedback on a detailed feature of the game from a broad population. The idea is to perform this method during the prototype phase for the developers to find a balance for basic features such as movement speed. 

Personally, I think this is a really smart and efficient method to use for the early stage of the development. It helps the developer to receive an average number of a certain function of their game, how people react to it and where is the acceptable/comfortable point for those who are not making this game to play. It helps the developer to avoid getting their vision “polluted” by their own interaction with the game, and the playtest itself has a really specific focus so they won’t need to worry about getting too much feedback with different directions that might effects the core concept and vision of the developers.

We didn’t get the chance to go to the public and talk with strangers during the production of this project. But we did take part of the method and use it for our first playtest. For our first playtest, we focus on our AI behavior and tried to find the right balance for our AI’s movement speed and detection distance. We made a simple UI for this version of the game with buttons that contain a few preset numbers for the speed and distance. We asked players to try out different presets while they are playing and asked them which one they like the most. We got a clear understanding about an ideal speed and distance at the end of the playtest based on the feedback we received from our players. The buttons we put on the screen really help us to explain our intention to the players and help them to understand what they should pay attention on while they are playing.