We have animators!

Yep, we finally have actual animators working on the project...and they are very talented. We recruited them during a playtest at SCAD and they have now become a part of the family!

Beyond their amazing talent, they have awesome personalities!

Here they are:

Savannah Alexandra 

Animation Major 

SCAD Atlanta

Savannah's website!

Jalysa Leva 

Animation Major 

SCAD Atlanta

Jalysa's website!

So we bought a sink...

Yep, we bought a sink.

During our playtests up to now we have had problems with our playtesting hardware (tupperware container/webcam setup) not being convincing enough to people.

We need people to feel like they are washing their hands in a real sink to get the full experience of our platform and game.

So this was a long due upgrade of our hardware to give playtesters what they deserve. This will ultimately give us more accurate information from the playtests we observed.

We chose this particular vanity sink setup because the sink itself has a hole underneath the faucet which would be a perfect place for our camera to go, as shown to the left.

This vanity also has room underneath the sink for our storage needs. We will have the cords running behind it and have a place for the laptop to sit inside the cabinet so users never see the inner workings.

Matt had to drill a hole right behind the one you see to the left in order for us to get a camera to fit and face outward from the front hole. That wasn't easy but the result was perfect. Now all we need to do is hook everything up!

Before                                                        After

Grocery list for the week

So after we had our playtest, we took all of our notes from it and took the information from the survey and compiled it all together.

The main thing we observed from this is that most of the problems we noticed were due to not having an appropriate setup to playtest on.

At the moment, we are using a tupperware container as the "sink" and just attaching a household webcam to the container to pick up the hand motion inside. (shown on the left) The game itself is viewed on any monitor that we drag the cart in front of.

We plan to purchase an actual sink for the installation and have the monitor be placed behind a 2-way mirror to get an even more realistic effect.

Once we have the correct sink setup, it will make the user not take our platform and game so lightly. Users didn't seem to really imagine they were at a sink which caused many problems.

Also the camera angle was bad due to the shape of the container. Getting a sink will fix all of these issues!

For a camera, we ordered a pipe inspection camera because the one we've been using is just a household webcam and it's too bulky to fit in our sink's camera hole.

Stay tuned for more updates!

That playtest though...

So this week we did a playtest with our fellow classmates.

We have let people playtest our game/platform before but this time we tried it the professional way taught to us by our professor.

And here, we have an action shot of our friend Graham from class playing our game. As you can see, he was washing his hands in the make-believe sink we cobbled together to show our concept.

During this playtest we stood and watched our playtester's moves while they played the game. Even though our game is a short one, that made it almost more important to get our users' experiences while they played.

When making notes on the playtest we refrained from giving hints or telling the user what to do. We wanted to see if they could handle the game on their own which is our goal.

I made many random notes about each user; did they understand the mechanic to running? Did they notice the timer in the top middle of the screen? Did they win or lose? Did it require too much work to play the game?

All of these observations helped a lot in assessing whether our game/platform was on the right track!

After the playtesters were done we had them fill out a short playtest survey to get even more information out of their experiences. We made it a one page survey to make it a stress free experience for the users as well.

Here's a snapshot of our survey! We used Google Docs to create it. After they completed the survey it was sent directly to a spreadsheet for a summation of the answers. Google Docs for the win!

And there you have it! We'll see you on the flip!

Things to do!

It's our second quarter of Senior year and we have exciting things in store!

Below you will see the sprint document we created showing everything we plan to accomplish in 10 weeks.

Basically we had to sit down and think of what was most important to finish and when.

We decided that our top priorities are to finish the second video game and the physical installation/platform. 

Though our concept of playing video games via bathroom sinks is our main priority, we still need a shiny video game to get the idea across. Also we've been using a large plastic container to house the camera which has worked fine but hasn't given play testers the full bathroom experience we wanted.

And due to the growing need for data in various forms, we have decided to add a data visualization component to our platform. Essentially it will tell us how many people have been washing their hands, who didn't, and more numbers. This is an appealing feature that we are excited to work on!

Stay tuned to see our platform grow!

Where we are now! Crazy update!

Hey guys, it's Matt! I thought I'd fill you in on the changes that were made after last quarter... There were quite a few all around!

We've re-assembled our team! Josh and I have taken over full responsibility of the project as Sarah and Brice have moved onto projects of their own. Sarah has decided to take on a brand new project which we will be waiting to hear about! Brice is focusing more on his other team that he had been working with throughout our first quarter. With our Physical Computing Director and Art Director gone, we've had to appoint new responsibilities for each other. Unfortunately though, neither of us create character art or animations!

Of course this meant we would need to find someone to develop to art for our games, but that didn't mean we needed a full-time member on our squad. Therefore over the break we asked our colleagues for help and fortunately we found Alice Savell. Having previously seen her art style, Josh recommended that we give her a shot. It paid off:

On top of that, we've also been considering a completely new feature: Data Visualization. We want to record how many people enter the bathroom, how many people wash their hands, how many people complete the game, and so on. This will give us very interesting statics all running in the background of our game for people to later analyze. How many people do you think wash their hands after using the restroom?

Though this coming quarter looks slightly more daunting with the workload, we are still overly enthusiastic and have a plan to make the most unique interactive experience yet!

The man behind the curtain (Programming)

Matt kicked ass on this project with all the coding he did. Here to join you now is Matt Bone, master processing genius...

Hey guys, here's the scoop on the programming bit from start to finish! Firstly, I'm by no means a programmer (though I thank you for the encouragement, Josh.) From the beginning our four person team lacked a standard programmer, but we all had some experience with Javascript from a previous class we've all taken under the ITGM curriculum. This class used OpenProcessing, so we began our tests using that.

As our game ideas developed, we realized how simply they could be made. Without any reason to move to another program to run the game, I kept building on what was becoming our Alpha. Though I hadn't realized it yet, my methods for creating our game were inadequate for what a professional team should do--as well as inadequate for the class; I wasn't keeping any organized method for documenting my process.

There are several explanations why this occurred, but I'd rather focus on how we're going to manage the programming portion from now on. We will be starting our next quarter with our Alpha build. Following this build, there will be version updates for every bug fix, feature addition, and code clean-up. On the first tab of each OpenProcessing Sketch, there will be a version name and number with a description of the changes made since the previous version.

I hope you enjoy it!