February 16 -20

Chapter One is on the Kindle.

Chapter One

For the upcoming sprint: Chapter Two and Chapter Three. It’s a stretch goal, especially with the amount of illustration slated to finish (10+ images), but we’re trying to push before the time sink of GDC + Spring Break are upon us.

We’ve absorbed a lot of feedback. At this point, our goals can be broken down into three categories: Entertainment, Usability, and Art. This came up when we were talking to Heather Kelly last week. We mentioned that during Quarters, some of the faculty asked about features of standard e-books – the ability to move between landscape and portrait views, or to change the size of text. Instinctively, the team hesitated to say we’d make that happen. This hesitation brought to light the priorities of this project. Usability is one of them, but prioritized after the other two. The next most important is Entertainment – we want to produce a complete story that’s enjoyable. First, however, is Artistic Vision – for the digital content to break new ground in the language of digital media.

For example, we added a parallax image to the first chapter – an illustration of Summer looking back over her father’s shoulder at her mother and sister. She’s angry and hurt at this point, and we hoped that portraying the physical distance between her and her mother and sister would help relate the emotional distance she’s feeling.

Laura made this browser-version of the parallax image test. She’s also been curating sounds. Will’s been setting up playtests with local schools. He also reached out to some psychology/HCI researchers on main campus who have studied the intersection between illustrations and reading comprehension. I’ve been editing the story, and working with Laura to layout the pages in InDesign. Allyn’s polishing some of the features from Chapter One, as well as developing a sound manager system. Hannah has been making lots of illustrations.

Working on Illuminated Letters

On Monday, Hannah, Laura, and I learned how to use the laser cutter. Laura made a vector based version of our logo so we can potentially make promotional material with the laser cutter. Many options.