Mentor Review - Christian

Christian is my first mentor that I had picked because he is the person I am the closest with and I also believe that he is the person who would be most open to giving me computer science / coding related feedback the quickest. He is also a senior majoring in Computer Science (Data Science) at Colorado School of Mines, so when he watches me work on any code, he has always expressed interest in helping me or giving me feedback. So, ever since starting this project I have been asking him for his opinion. He has helped me bounce ideas off of him in the early process of the Capstone proposal as well as suggesting creating achievements or different rewards. I had him review all my total work and compare it to what I have shown him over time. We had a quick conversation over the online platform, Discord, as it is the easiest and quickest way to reach him. I sent him links to the following two videos:

Visual Reference: Tutorial + 3 Tracks:

https://vimeo.com/912347760

Physical Reference: Tutorial + 3 Separate Tracks for One Day:

https://vimeo.com/918519362

His Response:

From here, I think I am getting positive feedback from people and it is helpful to hear that he thinks I've made progress as well, since he is the one that has interacted with it the most. He touches on the fact that the tutorial is "a lot more" fleshed out than the Unity game but does understand that the game is not finished and will change in development. The overall opinion is that the tutorial was effective enough to let the users understand the process of what they are trying to do. He also touches on the fact that some of the tutorial pop-ups cover the UI and that making transparent will allow people to understand more that they are pop-ups. As well as the fact that the tutorial made in Unity isn't integrating the UI but more explaining information to the user and allowing them to do the actions. Most game tutorials will walk the user THROUGH the actions, which is what he is suggesting. I agree that the final version needs to reflect better and more intuitive UI so the user doesn't have to guess and is instead guided. I agree the tutorial needs to include a store portion that should probably include having the user buy their first decoration for the tank, so the user understands the reward feedback loop. My game just shows that the money goes up by 200 when it is tracked, but that doesn't really make the user understand why or what they can do to get more. His suggestion about an achievement for completion of the tutorial is a great one! I can make the user aware of it by leading them to that tab in the tutorial and prompting them to select the achievement to read it. The user will understand the achievement reward feedback loop by then completing the tutorial and getting a reward! Finally he mentioned the fact that when you tracked in the Adobe XD prototype the fish become larger and larger with each track. That is not shown in the Unity prototype but I still think that it would be a good way of showing visual progress on the screen. In my final version, I would like to have some kind of visual indication of progress besides rewards. I think either the fish growing in color (starting white and changing a color slowly with more progress) or starting small and growing larger in size. I had asked Christian about the color changing option a bit ago and he had thought that it would be better to have types of fish that you could choose from to make them more notable. I also remember him saying that it wouldn't really make sense and a tank of all white and blossoming colors may be boring in the beginning for the user. However, in the end I may go with a growing option and a series of unlockable achievement colors that can be applied in different ways to the different types of fish. Even if Christian is older than the demographic, I still feel like his opinion is very valuable.