11/3 – 11/7
What We Did:
This week we made a lot of progress with our backend. At long last, the navigation module is finally integrated with our project. Sparky is now able to tell you directions leading you to your destination when you hit the key waypoints. The next step is to integrate our animations with our code so that people can be visually lead to their destinations
instead of just using our text to speech system.
We were also able to squash almost all of the known bugs that have been plaguing our project for quite some time. This also includes the speech rate for the companion. At long last, Sparky can now speak at a much faster rate than before!
From an Art standpoint, Rex has been constantly iterating on the animations for the robot trying to improve their aesthetic appeal as well as making sure that the message that the robot’s action is trying to convey is readable. As the animations are being built, they are also being integrated into their corresponding call component in our state machine script.
We explored different feedback systems for visually telling that the companion is talking and listening. They still need a bit more polish, but we have managed to rule out some systems that felt very disjointed with our robot companion. Next week we will be testing if these systems are sufficient enough or if users need a bit more visual feedback to get the point across.
We did one user test with our current experience on Friday which brought up a wealth of components that we need to fix, polish or accept as a scope limitation which was great to find out when we still have two weeks until demo day,
as opposed to the day of showcasing.
Challenges:
There is a saying: Time, Polish , Technical Components*, pick two of them. As mentioned in the last newsletter, there are no more impossible technical challenges anymore given our scope, but it does take time to finish them, integrate them and time is burned especially quickly when it comes to polishing these components.
We have very high aspirations for this project’s deliverable, and so we are working hard to hit our goals.
*Normally this is cost/quantity but in this project’s context I will equate the two.
Plan For Next Week:
By Wednesday we should have resolved all of the concerns that were raised from Friday’s playtest. We plan to also be user testing other components of our application and getting feedback and polish done on those components as they come online.
The polish for our project on core systems (animations, user feedback, programming systems, dialogue and so forth) will continue throughout the next week into the start of the showcase week.
There still is so much we’d like to be able to accomplish by the end of the project. We just need to spend our time wisely for the biggest bang for buck components so we can have a great demo-day showcase on the 20th and 21st!