Hello from Kotodama Fruit Juice!
Lots to update with as we work hard towards our soft opening. Our virtual character Fred is now responding to interruptions based upon his Confidence level, recovering appropriately, and continuing on his monologue.
Speaking of the monologue, after running a few different ideas past faculty and students, we determined that Fred’s stand up routine would be based around Parents and Family. These concepts are universal to most of our demographic, and it will allow us to be more generic with our phrasing while still including a wide variety of individuals and experiences.
Taking the feedback from halves, we are also working to improve Fred’s detection of words and phrases so that the player feels as if they have more agency. Fred is able to now ask questions of the audience, and depending on their reply, his direction and intonation will change. We hope that including the audience in this way will increase their agency during our experience.
On Friday, we took a series of 30 questions and asked them of playtesters to see which were more provocative. Interestingly enough, we were able to get a wide range of results with very little “garbage” — that is to say, the playtesters seemed engaged with Fred and directed their concerns to him, not our team, which suggests that we are getting to a very good place.
We have three weeks to hone our product into something fantastic — most of the groundwork is done, and now we just need to playtest continually in order to tweak our interaction and get the most bang for our buck. People like Fred — we just need to get him out into the world!
Fred’s monologue will be drafted by Monday and Finalized by that Friday, so that we can continue iterating on other aspects of the project. The grammar and speech detection is still being refined, and Fred is still in need of a few animations. Three weeks is not a lot of time – but we are focused and the direction is clear for us as we continue forward.