Hola from team Kotodama Fruit Juice and the Speak with Purpose project!
It’s been an eventful week, with lots to update on, starting with a post-mortem of our 1/4s presentation and the decision of decisions: what are we building!? Seriously?
1/4s went better than expected and helped focus our team on the “Once Upon a Time” trajectory for the project. Key points of 1/4s feedback:
- Drew: Don’t make the character derisively dumb – we want to root for the character and empathize with it. Kind of like a dog (Drew likes dogs). Make the character cute so that we have positive feelings towards the character. Character does not have to be ignorant, instead there could be a miscommunication between the player and the character. Similar to the game Telephone). Thinks miscommunication is funny.
- Melanie: Likes the interrupting the story idea. Thinks the player should be rewarded with better
- Brenda: Loves interruption but doesn’t like multiple choice options. Instead try “mad libs”…maybe with story options for interrupting the story. poetry. Wants to be able to play with the emotional climate of the story.
- John: Does the tone of the player matter? Does dialogue only communicate through specific words,
- *Nobody likes Siri.*
- Chris: Think about using a questionnaire at the beginning to calibrate your application to your players’
- Shirley: Make sure your scope is small
- Anthony: One way to deal with the lag in processing input is to implement a “thinking time” feature so that the lag looks like the character is thinking or pondering – seems more natural. Try to distract the user during these times to reduce frustration.
- Anthony: People fall in love with cute empathic animations. Animations are key
- Ruth: Narrow scope and do lots of play testing.
- Mike: Need to answer the question – why speech and not typing? We need to give a reason to the player as to why they are talking at this thing instead of typing. Thinks switching what the player can control might be fun – in the beginning you control only the environment but at some point during gameplay you get to control the minion directly.
Using this information, we as a team decided to move forward with the interactive speaking and interruption demo and began theorizing settings and narratives. We took a list from 10 to 3 to 1 before finally settling on a setting and concept that is both familiar and flexible: comedy. Specifically, stand up comedy. What started as a visual joke has become our guiding light!
Momo has completed modelling our main character and it’s been shipped off to our Rigger to prepare for animation.
Next week will be a crucial one for the project, as we have a major playtest Wednesday afternoon to explore our narrative choices and begin to build a dialogue database, a professional improviser will be running through some exercises on film for us on Friday, and we are driving toward a technical prototype for the end of the week for actor and animation reference.
Speak with Purpose has been a funnel shaped production cycle from the start, and it’s nice to see it coming into focus as we ramp up production. Our goal from the beginning has been to surprise… keep an eye out 🙂
Talk to you next week!