Week 6:

This week, Stephanie and Kirsten completed the first iteration of the scripts for all four incidents. Upon completion, we sent them to design consultant Whitney Beltran and drama student Talia Levin for feedback in terms of conciseness in dialogue, scenario believability, character cohesiveness, and satisfactory choices offered. Meanwhile, the main campus group conducted initial playtests with the overall stories and general incident outlines. They compiled results from male and female playtesters, noting their reactions and feedback towards the scenarios, the characters, and the available choices. These results have been very helpful in informing us for editing and tweaking our scripts and storyboards. In this vein, Stephanie and Wenyu sat down and completed the storyboard for the last incident at the party, which has now been placed on the shared Box folder for the main campus team to use in their playtests.

The team decided to push back the photoshoot with the drama students until Sunday March 1st in order to allow the main campus groups more time to playtest the storyboards and collect feedback. While we all agree to be flexible on dialogue, the artists prefer the shots to be as concrete as possible before the photoshoot. In the meantime, Wenyu is continuing to storyboard the rest of the incidents while Cewon has finished various shots for the first incident as well as organized the shot lists for easier retrievability.

On Wednesday, each team member met with Chris and Ralph individually to discuss their process grades. We each discussed our progress in the project and how we have been working with each other. In the afternoon, we held a full team meeting to discuss how panel transitions will look and work in the application. Wenyu and Cewon discussed their artistic vision for the transitions, and Mahar and Ladera discussed how they could most easily implement them. We brought our ideas to the main campus group so that they could help visualize the transitions for the programmers.

On Friday morning, Sabrina Haskell-Culyba from Schell games came to talk to the team about the project she headed, PlayForward. She gave us valuable insight on player decision making, creating tough situations and creating player investment in the non-playable characters and the game in general. She also expressed interest in playtesting our product later on in the semester. Mahar also created the first iteration of the intervention choice implementation, giving a 3-choice panel structure that the player can click on, expanding the chosen panel into the rest of
the screen. Ladera looked into converting the current images into vector images for zoom in ability within a panel. Unfortunately, the created vector image had colors bleeding on the character face, with seams appearing on the clothing. We will continue the project using pixel images.

Next Week:

By Tuesday next week, we plan on having all of the storyboards completed for playtesting so that we are ready for our photoshoot next Sunday. We also hope to see the animated panel transitions from the main campus group by Tuesday as well. Hopefully we will be able to get script feedback this weekend or early next week so that we can edit and revise the scripts for continued playtesting.

We are still waiting on hosting information in order to proceed with backend analytics which will also hopefully be solved early next week so that we start looking into the programmatic requirements to achieve data gathering.

Week 5:

This week, our artists completed the initial characters and environments for the first panels of the application. Cewon, our character artist, drew from our photo references of the actors to create the images here:

Wenyu, our environment artist, created the environment scenes shown below:

To get our first comic panel, our artists put the characters and environment to get the initial panel composition, and our programmers, Mahar and Ladera, created a mockup of how the panel would move on a web page.

We also solidified our story outline to the particular incidents we want to cover:
1. An initial catcalling incident, where the guest is encouraged and rewarded for intervening.
2. A very forward flirting incident, where the guest should initially believe they are required to intervene, but instead discover that the flirting was wanted and consensual.
3. A rape myth debunking scene, where the guest is presented with all the stereotypical images of a nighttime, dark alley rape scene but has it revealed as innocuous instead.
4. The physical sexual assault scene, which takes place at a house party and acts as the climax of the application.
After the final incident, we want to place a good and bad ending, depending on whether or not the guest managed to correctly intervene in the situation. We have emailed our client, Jess Klein, as well as a colleague of hers, Lucas Christain, about what appropriate interventions in these situations would look like. In the meantime, much of the script for the party scene has been written, and has been sent to Lucas for any feedback he might have.

On Wednesday, Patronus had our ¼ walkarounds, where ETC faculty come around the project rooms and give feedback on the progress and future plans of the projects in an ungraded context. We put together a brief presentation of our progress so far as well as what we hoped to work on for the rest of the semester, and we gladly received a lot of feedback as to resources that could help us out. The ETC’s acting and improvisation instructor, Brenda Harger, has previously worked in many programs dealing with sexual harassment in the workplace, and will meet with the team next week on feedback for our scripts. Another ETC faculty member, Jesse Schell, worked on a game at his company Schell Games called PlayForward that dealt with HIV prevalence in innercity communities, which featured similar sorts of situations and choices that a player had to navigate, and talked to us about various features of the game.

We also gave our quarters presentation to Lucas Christain and the main campus class on Thursday in order to share with Lucas the structure and progress of our project. He enjoyed it and emphasized that many applications of this nature tend to fail when there is no follow up, so having a following facilitated discussion would contribute heavily to the success of the project. The main campus team also presented, showing us designs and wireframing for the user interface of the application. In their design, a student would login with their CMU ID, which would log if they completed the experience and their initial results and choices. The main comic would play out, but there would be a laptop icon in the corner that can be regularly accessed, giving background information on the characters in a Facebooklike format. At the end of the experience, text responses about the experience would show up for the student to fill out and send to a future facilitator. A video gallery of real life testimonials would also be available to watch, and the experience would be replayable, though any future results would not be logged.

We also created a rough schedule for the team regarding the project timeline, highlighting major benchmarks such as halves, springbreak, soft opening and final presentations. The point of the timeline is to give a visual representation of the available weeks remaining to complete our work. The calendar is posted in our project room as a reminder of the upcoming deadlines.

On Friday, the team met with Bryan Maher about the backend analytics and data collection that our application will most likely require. He let us know that programmatically, all the data we want to gather (like time spent on panels, which choices a student went with, gathering and sending text responses, etc), would probably all be very straightforward, and programmable within just a couple of days. However, he brought to our attention that if our eventual intention was to host our application on the CMU server, using CMU IDs to login, there is a lot of administrative contacting we’re going to need to do. So before delving too deeply into this we need to know, how CMU wants a web application handed off to them, what format or language they would want it in, what kind of formsending CMU finds acceptable to host, who will be the primary administrator of the product once it is online, and the restrictions of working through Shibboleth, etc. We have thus contacted Andy and Jess at the main campus to see if there are any existing ideas or plans on how to host the application for its use, and are waiting for a response for next week.

Next week :

Next week Patronus will have finished, in entirety, our first prototype scene, the “Cat Calling” incident, and will have a better understanding of panel transitions and HTML5. By next week we will hopefully have some of the hosting questions answered so that our programmers can start working on the back end analytics for the product.
Also by next week, we want to have another photo shoot with the drama students scheduled. In order to do this, we plan on having our storyboards done for all the story scenes and a first pass of all the scripts completed. We will meet with Brenda for a script review as well as schedule a script workshop with Chris and Ralph. After the script review and workshop we plan on editing and iterating on the scripts so that the main campus team can continue to playtest the material.

Week 4: 2/2 – 2/6

Over the course of this week, Patronus took their branding art to the producer’s workshop on Monday. After receiving feedback and critique, our artist Wenyu modified the poster and half sheet. The poster is shown below, with the half sheet description below that.

Our branding art was completed and submitted for printing on Friday at noon. To hammer out our pipeline for creating scenes in our graphic novel, we started a prototype scene. We completed a script involving a catcalling incident, including differing dialogue and events depending on a single player choice. We created storyboards for our script, with Stephanie creating the initial layout, Cewon refining and clarifying the art, and Wenyu helping with the composition. Our finalized storyboards are shown below:

On Friday, Spencer brought his drama classmates to the ETC so that we could photograph the group acting out our prototype scene with still shots. Cewon plans on using these shots to produce our prototype so that we can gauge the length and intensity required for each scene.

A lot of time was spent this week discussing the story for our experience. We discussed possible incidents, story structure, and user interaction. We also discussed the possibility of using voice over instead of text in the experience, but settled on text/dialogue bubbles due to the workload and potential production hold ups recording voice overs would create. The team talked to story and design consultant Whitney Beltran about the subject of sexual assault and harassment and how to deal with such a complex issue in a digital experience. We also held a story workshop with Ralph and Chris to lay out the “skeleton” of our story, knowing this structure will allow us to consciously write the story and dialogue with a specific goal in mind. Through their assistance, our main story now has a basic three-act structure, where the first gives the player a clear place to intervene, the second motivates the player to intervene but immediately sends messages that it was not wanted there, and the third leading to the actual incident where the player must use their judgment to understand they should intervene.

We have also designed the basic interface for decision making in our graphic novel this week. The available options will appear as icons or smaller comic panels at the bottom of the screen, and the player must click and drag the option they choose to the middle of the screen. The panel would then expand, and the story would continue. Our HTML programmers, Mahar and Ladera, have been working this week to create the panel transitions that allow them to appear and move across the screen.

Next Week:

Our next week is quarters, where we will be visited by rounds of faculty from the ETC to see our project and give us feedback about our progress and intended future work. We will be creating a short presentation that shows the information, and the rest of the sessions will be devoted to questions and comments from the faculty. The presentations are ungraded, so as to facilitate honest discussion about project progress.

We hope to complete parts of our prototype by quarters to show faculty the form of our project. If not, we will likely show the art samples and storyboards we do have, and hope to complete the prototype pipeline by the end of the week. Meanwhile, we will continue to write and storyboard more scenes in our product according to our story skeleton. We are also hoping to look into analytics packages for our project to help analyze effectiveness of various story sections, as well as music and sound effects to begin adding in.