This week with we went about brainstorming and implementing changes based on our playtest results. Since this was a moving experience, pacing became much trickier than originally anticipated. There was no deterministic way of resolving the issue and so we implemented a mechanism to adapt to the viewer. As the experience proceeds, the bird would pause as the viewer looks around and resume movement when he/she looks in the direction where story events were to occur. Since the experience was now no longer railroaded, the environment also needed to react to the viewer accordingly. For example, the current glow implementation needed to change to glow until it caught the viewer’s attention. Similarly, sound could no longer be linear and had to be trigger based as well with a looping background score. At one stage, the bird moves in a circular path around a fountain. To execute this, the original idea was to fix the player’s forward orientation with that of the bird. However, we observed that no matter how smooth the rotation, this still caused an element of motion sickness. prompting us to rethink the bird’s path.
We re-arranged our schedule for these changes:
