Week 308

Lots of work on KOKORO this week. We fin­ished the first pro­to­type and playtest­ed it with a bunch of teenagers. Received plen­ty of help­ful feed­back. We need to do a prop­er eval­u­a­tion but my first impres­sion is that our deci­sion to struc­ture the prod­uct around a con­ver­sa­tion­al UI has been validated.

For the remain­ing projects on deck, we most­ly took stock of things and planned next steps. I reviewed the KOKORO release can­di­date with the whole team and made a list of final things to fix. Alper and I did some seri­ous plan­ning on the next phase of SHACHI, which should also cul­mi­nate in a release can­di­date. And I went over to TEDA­SUKE’s client to review the user jour­ney we mapped and to make a list of screens to mock up.

We had a call with Lekha to dis­cuss some upcom­ing mar­ket­ing efforts. Lekha has been work­ing on an artist state­ment which should go out soon. Short­ly after our call Bycatch got “hunt­ed” on Prod­uct Hunt.

Alper pub­lished a fun post on Slack­’s emo­ji reac­tions fea­ture.

As the week end­ed, I start­ed writ­ing up my thoughts on the auto­mat­ed game design sym­po­sium I attend­ed recent­ly. Mean­while Alper start­ed port­ing SHACHI to tablet, and inves­ti­gat­ed ways of improv­ing our iBea­con read­ing performance.