Alpha Update

This week, our focus was to add more features to our core system, start adding functionality to show what users can create from their building blocks, and we conducted an interview with a professional in education to get feedback on our product.

We fleshed out the core system so that the user can have the ability to make their desired creations. Aside from cubes, the other objects in the menu work as well such as ramps, cylinders, glow blocks, glass blocks, and more. You can rotate them by about 30 degrees to get the right angle. We also figured that users should have a fly mode during building so that they can build structures more easily. With a fine-tuned system, it allows for users to have an enjoyable experience with their creations and be able to show their friends what they made. This can bring their friends together for eventually a multiplayer system that allows children and users to be able to build together and come up with design ideas as a group.

We constantly emphasize that users can build anything they want, so we wanted to showcase an example of what you build in action. We wanted to make a rocket ship so we built out a basic design and added rocket engines to our build. In our video demonstration, we purposely also made "bad" rocket designs that work against the physics system to show that if we just placed objects that work against gravity or is physically impossible, it will create weird behavior. This will help children understand their creation and how physics can work. We added some seats for the user to sit on so that they can enjoy the blast off as well. In addition, our rocket ship creates smoke trail effects and has sound for launch as we spent some time in our creation making the rocket realistic.

In addition, we conducted an interview over Zoom with a superintendent who holds a Ph.D. in education. As our primary audience is for children, we believe a professional such as a superintendent could offer us useful experience in their dealings with children as we want our product to be, not only fun, but a learning experience. They provided us with valuable and insightful feedback in helping us fulfill our goal to help with child social and creative development. Her feedback was extremely helpful in letting us know her thoughts, where we can improve on, what she liked, and more giving us a clear direction in where we should head as we approach our final week of development.

Our plans are to add more functionality for users of our product to be able to add to their creation and explore multiplayer capabilities.