Hello and welcome to another harrowing adventure from the team at Kotodama Fruit Juice!
Since our heroes last left you, they were preparing to battle the mighty Halves Presentations armed with a lot of information and very little communicative ability — but a LOT of heart! — did they succeed?
Well, yes. And no. More on that later.
The presentation itself went as well as it could have from our perspective. We all tore up the stage and did a great job getting across a ton of information about Speech Input and games (and Fred). We knew that going into halves, we had a very difficult project to explain and most everyone who we’ve shown the progress to has had their own ideas about it — in some ways, this has been fantastic, because it has allowed us as a team to get tons of information from a variety of different angles and viewpoints. In other ways, however, it’s been detrimental to the project, as we often have to spend a lot of time explaining our constraints before eyes get wide with excitement. The problems we’re trying to solve aren’t obvious.
That’s a big fat flashing red warning light, and it’s one we need to address ASAP.
Chiefly, the question that was most critical of our project was that it seemed as if we were just doing speech DETECTION, that is, checking to see if the microphone was getting input. Needless to say, we clearly weren’t doing a good enough job showing our ideas if the takeaway was “Look! We’re using the Microphone as a hotkey!” In fact, even if it were just detection, it would matter only within the bounds of are we using it to compelling tell “Stories that Listen”… so we as a team need to get away from the technology and get closer to the interaction.
Moving forward, we’ve dubbed all of the text-to-speech lines with placeholder voiceover, and Heather is building an audio handler to smoothly transition between recorded tracks. Dilara is developing playtests to further our research goals and find the direction for which we should continue, and Arseniy is working diligently to push the team forward through the last half of the semester. Momo is bringing our character Fred to life through her stunning animations, and Allen is writing words and yelling into microphones
We plan to have weekly playable builds and a playtest session that is recorded for posterity. We’ve gathered a lot of information about what makes an audience member interact — now it’s time to put it to use.
WHOA. Look Out. We’re coming.
-KFJ