As quarters started to approach, we as a team began feel pressure and stress building. Quarters are a point in the semester to show our progress to faculty and receive valuable feedback about our process and ways to improve/move forward with the project. As we are a project about a story experience, the fact that we did not have a story yet meant we were really behind. While the faculty didn’t outright say it during their walk-arounds, we definitely felt their judgement with their broad questions and lack of suggestions. It was especially evident during our client faculty meeting, where we pitched general story ideas from both our writer Kate and some from our team, that we were not doing something correctly and were off course. We were pitching team ideas, however they were not being met with as recognition or positivity as we had hoped.

Finally, it was decided mid-week that there was a piece of the puzzle that was simply missing. After an in depth personal meeting between the producer and one of our faculty instructors, the culprit was finally discovered. During our initial team introduction email that disclosed that we were working with an external writer, there was a misinterpretation in the wording of her role. As it so happens, the intent was for her to be in charge of story and writing, not just as a collaborator, but as a lead. The puzzle pieces were starting to fall into place. The time that we were spending researching effective story techniques should have instead been dedicated to conversations with our writer on crafting story ideas. The story ideas that we were pitching to faculty as a 4 person team, were not being met with as much gratitude because it was alienating our writer.

Our instructors thought we didn’t like working with Kate, Kate thought we didn’t like her, we weren’t sure why our ideas weren’t sticking, and all in all it was a perfect storm of miscommunication, assumptions, and baseless hostility. Definitely far from the perfect working environment.

With this sorted out, and tensions finally coming down, we doubled down on shifting gears and shifting our research from story to technology and concepts, while digging much more in depth for story directly with our writer. A usable ideas was proposed for our instructors to review. Since we were very behind, they stipulated that, from this point on, “topic” could no longer be changed, only story structure. Our topic was a story told through interactions between ghosts/spirits, just in time for our Friday Faculty Sit-Downs.

Armed with an inkling of a story, we were able to discuss with faculty some process thoughts and get back some more usable feedback.

Some items of note that we needed to think about for week 5 were:

  • Consider that maybe AR isn’t a great medium for story? (just to play devil’s advocate)
  • Determine how much you want music and audio to drive the story, vs allowing a guest to figure out emotions on their own.
  • When dealing with episodic storytelling (multiple ghosts telling part of the story), make sure that the stories relate to each other for a greater sense of purpose.
  • There has to be a monumental emotional shift at the end.

And finally, one that we’ve been wrestling with a lot was: When determining the balance of game vs story experience, a game has a distinct progress goal, while a story experience has an emotional goal. This note in particular, while still vague, will definitely help us in the future as we determine what kind of meaningful emotions we incorporate into our experience

With a renewed sense of purpose and excitement, we hoped that our experiences in week 5 would be much more productive and positive.