For our playtest yesterday there weren’t many changes to the appearance and animations, but we were able to test some of the responsive aspects of the installation. One of the best aspects of having the installation on the screens is being able to watch people interact with it. A mom pointed out the big robot to her son and so Adam set the weapons in action to show the kid.
When the kid saw the robot hands open up to fire the laser, he yelled “nippers!”. Fun. 🙂
A visitor to the Robot University installation can interact with the robots in different ways. One of the robots involves dialogue interaction. The user can select messages to send to the robot, and it responds. It is an interaction that involves the user remotely running a mission on Mars. They command the Mars rover through the clunky and sometimes anxious robot in front of them.
I have been playtest-driven with this project, and because editing programs are not always publishing programs I’ve had to keep changing what tools I use. For the first playtest I conducted with actors, I used the free online interactive narrative publishing tool Inkle Writer. I had begun writing the dialogue just in Word, but switched to this online service.
