Mingzhe Xue
Upward Falling Project
Our Team
Suraj Greenlund
Background in biomedical product development and programming. Knows Unity and micro-controllers. Avid gamer.
Taylor Tidwell
Focus in experiential design. 3D modeling, illustrative rendings, and client interfacing. Intermediate programming.
Mingzhe Xue
Visual design, character design. Programming experience. Experienced gamer. Wants to learn how to design a good game.
What is Upward Falling
We want to create an installation to enable 2+ people to have an IRL or online interaction with each other in a unique way
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So how do we create an experience that cultivates an encouraging and cooperative environment in a time where physical interaction is limited and the social atmosphere is extremely polarized?
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Here is our answer:
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What we do for the project
Two people find themselves locked in a room without their memories and new owers to aid them. As they journey through unfamiliar worlds they find they have more in common then they originally thought. We want to create a game like this:
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Create a 2+ player arcade-style game that requires all parties involved to work together to sole fun interactive puzzles and move through the levels
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Use leap motion sensor along with simple arcade-style joystick to users physically interact with each other and the game
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Gaming experience in person but both players are separated with plexiglass divider to maintain social distancing.
Prototype and design for the game
Basic possible art assets design
These are the possible characters we may use in the project and other environment assets designs we have for this project.
Leapmotion, controller and in-person workshop
Covid made everything hard to execute fast and easily, in-person meetings are still meaningful and help the team a lot during programming and user testing.
Leapmotion and the controller we use
Group coding and user testing
Spaceman game by Taylor
The spaceman game is our first try. Taylor mainly designed this traditional 2D adventure game, and this is the first step for us to learning to use the Unity engine. By making this traditional RPG game we learned the basic feature of using the engine, and the outcome is still amazing, we have all the basic elements we want for a game.
manuscripts and in-game screenshot
Upward Falling game by Suraj
The Upward Falling game is mainly designed by Suraj. This is the game we are trying to make in our original design. Upward Falling is a top-down game, which is different from what we used to make. Top-down design is good for making a puzzle-solving game, we also added the feature of two playing cooperation gameplay in the game. All of the new features made the developing progress harder than before. But the outcome is still satisfying, and we believe if we have more time we can have more level designed for the game.
Level and abilities designs
User testing plan
Biases we want to avoid
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Game played in developer’s office → Leads to positive bias towards games.
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Sessions led by company employees → Lead to positive bias towards the game, as employees working on the game for ages are emotionally invested in the game.
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Asking questions in the wrong manner → Leads to a game evaluated higher than it should be.
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Asking the wrong questions → leads to a game evaluated higher than it should be.
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Survey results as quantitative evidence → lead to an inaccurate view of the game.
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Research & testing conducted in a group setting → People to ask each other for help – not representative of how people play in real life.
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Selecting friends/other game developers to test → positive sampling bias.
Items we want to test
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Identify features to test
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Hand control
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General game mechanics
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Aesthetic
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Difficulty
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Identify userbase
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Who is our target audience? We ideally find similar people to test the game
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Survey? Compensation?
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Set-up for room
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Use a neutral room (avoids bias)
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Cameras/mics to record testers
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Make sure everything is sanitized
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Observation area for developers to take notes
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During testing
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Ideally, developers and testers should not come in contact (to avoid biases)
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3rd party moderator in the room instead (who tells testers they aren’t involved in development)
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Remove moderator from room for some amount of time (can be short) to see if playtesters’ behaviour changes
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Encourage both people (since it’s a multiplayer game) to talk out loud but also assure that want them to have fun
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Write notes on post-its or similar to organize later into categories
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Post-test
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Digital survey (google survey or even voice record) or talk to moderator?
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Questions about identified features, etc.
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Organize post-it notes into categories and identify key action points/items to work on
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User testing
Improvements in the future
It is still a little pity that we are still trying to add the leapmotion hand control feature to the game till the end of the game. The starting point is good, but we underestimate the difficulty of developing one satisfying game. And also, adapt the leapmotion to let it work with Unity is much hard than we expect. Clearly, we need more time and experience to learn to use work on the leapmotion, so that we can add the hand control as a high feature to our game. There are still some barriers to cover, and the adaption of the leapmotion would be our next goal to finish.