February 9 – 13

Monday was Quarters. The team met with all of the faculty round by round, and pitched our project. There were some recurring comments. One was a concern about how we are going to test our ideas. Remember, the driving hypothesis here is that we can use features specific to a digital format to enhance a story – but how do we test whether a story is enhanced? What does “enhanced” mean? What questions do we ask our playtesters to prove this?

We talked about it: to enhance, for our purposes, is to create more immersion within the world of the story. So, our digital features will be building on the characterizations, setting or plot advancements of the tale. One way to test their effect would be to ask playtesters about the content of the story. This establishes whether story elements are communicated better when accompanied with extra features or a normal e-book presentation.

On Tuesday, Jane Bernstein, our client at the English Department and story editor, delivered her first round of edits of the first full draft of the story. It’s been great to get an extra pair of eyes on the story.

Laura finished a piece of ActionScript that takes a sequence of pngs and automatically applies a fading transition and cuts it down to a choppier frame count, achieving a flip-book quality animation. We think animation presented this way is more in theme with the experience of a book we’re trying to create.

For the upcoming sprint, we want to implement Chapter 1 – having it on the Fire, enhancements and all, for Thursday.