Time runs, liquid flows 

To test out our game's concept we made an analogue version where we tried out different bottle sizes, forms and materials. We put down a few bottles, the vive wand and a cauldron where all ingredients had to be added. We then drew up simple symbols that each represented an ingredient that had to be grabbed in order. I stopped the time to test out the time-pressure. Since we wanted to give new recipes at the beginning of each round we tested how well people were able to assign each symbol to the respective bottle, which area of the game drew the most focus, how much time an average round took and of course if the concept was any fun and which were the most exciting parts. Since we didn't have endless vive trackers, to further complicate the recipes we thought about introucing the Vive Wand Controller as a hand to grab herbs or fruits. All these learnings went into the following digital prototype.

A nice effect of having multiple vive trackers, was that it intuitively allowed playing together to faster solve the recipes. When we presented the game on the final day many players that tried it out instantly had the instinct of playing it together so noone had to wait and watch. Doing this up to 5 players were possible.

For the people that still wanted to stand and watch we added a nice visual interest in small characters, spawning at each finished recipe, that fell into the room in the back and then followed a little logic and wandered around or sat down. This made watching way more fun.

Wreak havoc: When developing the game we continuously asked ourselves what aspects of the experience could be unique and how it could serve the players fantasies as a playground for things not possible for us in the real world. There we lent into the idea of chaos and mixing dangerous combinations in a fast rush, while not caring about the cleanliness or order of our world. To enhance this experience we added decals and many feedback effects that made the scene feel messy and lived in. 

Since the scene was quite static and one always saw the same objects. I added that the light situation randomly changes on the start of each new playthrough for more visual interest. I made a list where we included all lighting situations, which we liked and then one was randomly chosen. This was received very well and players often said something like: "Oh, I don't know this level yet I want to try it out!"

Figuring out the vive trackers felt a little tedious at first, but once we got the hang of it it was fairly easy to achieve what we wanted with them. We first set us the goal of implementing a simple cube as representation for one tracker. When we had this we quickly made a prototype level, where we first implemented a bottle that tilted together with the tracker. Here it was quite difficult to get the rotation of the flask to match the worlds up axis. But also there upon achieving this we basically had all the vive's features implemented and could start coding the game.