With diverse characters, voice actors and stories, Virtro develops different experiences for different users. Virtro is a one of the best female-led companies and they have a number of diverse projects in their portfolio. They built an AR teddy bear street-fighting game (Tedden) and wanted to work with us to prototype an Augmented Reality (AR) pipeline to improve the game aesthetics. A secondary goal was to propose solutions that gave this game a reason to exist in an AR environment.
Visualization is one of the essential elements for a game, which has the potential to draw more attention from the general public, leading them to play the game and making for a more ‘sticky’ experience.
The team aimed to produce a prototype of an app that would demonstrate teddy bear fighting in an AR environment. This app would be accessible to new and existing mobile game players, allowing users to play it anytime and anywhere through the use of an AR marker. The team aimed to use Unity to accurately recreate the scenario of teddy bears in 3D.
Tedden: Street fighting teddies in ar. Tedden | Street Fighting Teddies in AR. (n.d.). Retrieved December 13, 2022, from https://www.virtrogames.com/tedden
The goals of the interview were to identify our users and learn about their behaviors. We targeted users between 20 to 35 years old. We interviewed a small population within our cohort (as we were constrained to a school wide nda) limiting our participants to those in the software development field. The majority of people expressed an interest in Tedden. However, 60% of them would play this game for free. 40 % of people were willing to pay around $0.99 to $5. As a result, over 60% of people would play a mobile game, but only 16.7% of people were willing to pay for it. In order to create personas, we chose two people from the interview.
Based on the user research, we narrowed the target of our persona into two types of users: the UX Designer and the Engineer. The reasons we chose the UX Designer and the Engineer were as follows: They would be willing to spend money for a mobile game. Both have lived in Asia and North America before. They use their phone while they are idle. They want to have social connections with people through mobile games.
Creating the user journey was the most effective way to find the pain points of the app. We compiled the users’ goals, actions, motivations, problems and opportunities into a timeline, which combined storytelling and visualization. We imagined what their experience would be like, from what and where they could scan the marker, as well as their possible interactions and expectations of the app.
The main pain points of the app were (according to our client partner):
The in-game aesthetics are not appealing
Users would need to have the AR marker to use the app
Unless an avid Pokémon Go user, AR mobile gaming is not that popular. Users get confused about the difference between a traditional mobile game and an AR mobile game
The main opportunities for the app were:
It allowed people to experience AR mobile games
It allowed people to play the game anytime and anywhere
It allowed people to connect with others through local multiplayer
We listed the top three features that we felt would have the biggest impact. During the process, I found it was hard to define the definition of done for each of these features. The best way to solve this problem was by doing the sprint review together. Through this, we could prioritize the features again, reconfirm with the client about their expectations and could ask any questions that we had.
At the end of the sprint, we faced some technical challenges which we struggled with for two days. We all tried to solve the problems together. We listed all of the issues we had. As PM, I went to find people who might know how to solve these problems. I was so proud of my team, we've solved many problems together.