Home Alone Blog Post 1

Prototype Action Plan

This week we’ve been focusing on laying the basic groundwork for the game – setting up the scene, finding sprites and tiles online, and putting together movement and collisions. We still have a lot to do to make the game match our concept and implement our mechanics, but we expect that once the coding part is done everything after that will be easy in comparison. We’ve stayed on schedule over the past few days but here is how we plan on organizing our time to finish the first prototype for P3:

Saturday 9/28/19 – Sunday 9/29/19:

• Make sure in game actions work and interact with health bar system
• Set up timer system for a full 9-to-5 work day (8 min of playtime)
• Find assets for cat items (litter box, cat toys, food and water bowls)
  • or make ourselves if we can’t find what we need
• UI text pop ups for actions

Monday 9/30/19 – Tuesday 10/1/19

• Test a full day of the game: all functionality implemented
• Add sound
• Basic title/menu screen + pause/quit functionality

Research Method for Study 1: Interview

We plan to ask 5 direct questions, but we will also ask them to talk through their experience using the 5 questions to guide the conversation about the game. We will tell the players they can play as long as they want and observe their play session in the user experience lab. Our goal is to recruit 10 participants for the study. We will have them play the game in the User Experience Lab and observe their play session.

Interview Questions (A list of possibilities but planned to choose five in the end):

1. What are the elements of the game that keep you staying in  the game?
2. What about the game would make you want to play again?
3. Are there any features in the game that you felt were not engaging to you?
4. Rate your investment in the happiness of the game character:
   1. Not at all invested, somewhat invested, very invested
5. What are your favorite parts of the game? 
6. What are your least favorite parts of the game?
7. How would you improve upon the design to make you more invested in the character’s health and happiness?
8. True/False*: I feel motivated to play this game because I feel enjoyment from it
9. True/False: I feel motivated to play this game because I feel that I am being rewarded for playing
10. True/False: Playing this game makes me feel challenged 

*with True/False questions we will ask participants to describe in detail why they did or didn’t identify with the statement

Summary

We’ve made good progress over the past couple of days! What started out as a badly drawn and animated cat sprite by Sonya in an empty background has now blossomed into this:

She moves! She’s cute! 😀 the area will get more filled in once the interactible objects and their sprites are placed.