Week 6 – Back to school, optical illusions, and making sound cue-based games!

            Finally back to school and attending classes again, after a family emergency had kept me away from class for 2 weeks. This week’s first lecture was about optical illusions and awareness, which I found to be interesting. We were shown a video featuring 2 teams of players, one black one white, playing basketball. We were told to count how many passes the white team makes during the video clip. In the end everyone who guessed it right was happy, until it asked if we had seen the “moonwalking” bear, which actually passed through the players amidst the confusion. This video was apparently used to test our awareness level, where I’ll admit I didn’t catch the moonwalking bear passing through the players. 

Discussing which game to use

Voting on which game to use

                For the second lecture, we were told to design a sound cue-based game for Professor Nacke to play while blindfolded. It was pretty hectic as the class voted to pick one game for the professor to play, and finally we had chosen to let him play a maze game using sound cues to avoid the player hitting the walls. We had removed all the chairs and then made a maze using all the students in the class. We then tested the game twice using Mike, once blindfolded and once without a blindfold. When professor Nacke tried it, it worked pretty well since every time he was about to run into somebody or an object, someone yelled a “beep” noise to keep him on track. He made it to the end with little complications, but in the end the game was as fun or challenging as we thought. To make it more interesting, we could have had someone narrate a part of a story at certain checkpoints in the maze, as well as having more sound effects to make the gameplay more dynamic and interesting. The idea behind this was from the game Battlefield, which would make the game more fun and satisfy professor Nacke’s expectations :)

Layout of the maze and desired path

Watching as professor Nacke attempts the maze

                Stay tuned for more updates to my blog next week!