Week 10:

On Sunday the 22nd, Team Patronus met with our live actors from CMU’s drama students shot photos of them for Incidents 1 and 2, as well as getting a few hanging shots from Incident 4. We were able to finish obtaining all of the photoshoot materials for all three primary scenes of our experience, which allowed us to quickly move into the lineart and composition phases for the rest of the week.

With the new photos, Kirsten and Stephanie were able to complete the pre-compositions for the entire experience, selecting photos from the photoshoot and using PowerPoint to arrange them all in the format of the panel with dialogue bubbles to simulate the panels in the final experience. With these pre-compositions all completed, Cewon could use them to move straight into drawing the lineart for the rest of the scenes. The team has decided, with agreement from the main campus, that the name of our product will be “Decisions that Matter: An Interactive Experience”.

Cewon completed all the lineart for Incident 4, sending the art down the pipeline to Wenyu for the environment compositions. She is well on her way to completing the lineart for Incident 2 as well. With the finished Incident 4 lineart, Wenyu was able to create all of the rough, uncolored components of the background and environment of all the shots, which he could then pass to Ladera to place in the programmatic scene. Once Ladera placed the shots in scene, Stephanie was able to code all the scene dialogue while Mahar implemented the interactive features of the dialogue and intervention branches. Through this pipeline, the team was able to complete a fully functional prototype for Incident 4 by Friday night, in time for playtesting the following day during the ETC’s organized Playtest Day.

While the programmers prepared the prototype for Playtest Day, Kirsten worked on building a questionnaire for our playtesters to answer before and after going through our experience. These questions focused on the guest’s ability to recognize themselves and their role in the experience, how compelling they found the story and interactivity, and how well the experience as a whole educated them about the options they can have as a bystander in real life situations of assault. We received feedback from 18 different testers throughout Saturday, though the majority of them were aged over 30, and thus out of our target demographic. We received primarily positive feedback from all our testers, though, with only minor questions and complaints over some of the UI aspects and how well they were taught.

Ladera was also able to meet Mike Christel regarding how best to go about playtesting as well as what kinds of data to collect in the backend of our experience to pass on to discussion facilitators at the end. Ladera also spoke with Bryan Maher, who told us that he would look into setting up a test server at the ETC to let us try using Shibboleth as a login for our experience. Ladera will hopefully be receiving notice from Bryan later this week about the status of the ETC test server.

Next Week:

Patronus’s goal by the end of Week 11 is to have Incident 2 fully functional in our playable prototype, from lineart to composition to shots to implemented dialogue, very much in the same way Incident 4 was completed last week. We also want to establish the kinds of transitions we want to use for our panels early on in the week, given that our current panel transitions are rough slide transitions from top to bottom, to start implementing them in the new scenes early on. On the art side, we want to have all our compositions for all the incidents completed by the end of this week, which will allow for the color version of our art to start being developed in the following week.

We have asked Spencer and Isabel, our actors for the main characters of our experience, to come in to the ETC again next Sunday to film the final videos that will come at the end of our experience, where they will come from their graphic novel form into real, live-action recountings of their feelings on the events of the story. We hope to hear about their availability in the next day or two.

Week 8 & 9 :

On Monday this week, team Patronus had their halves presentation. Afterwards, the team sat down to assess their progress for the first half of the semester. The faculty and the team agree that Patronus is behind schedule for production. As a team, we looked at aspects of the story we could cut and talked about ways we could refine the production pipeline. Both the main campus and the ETC team agreed that Incident 3 was the least effective in the storyline and playtesters were not correlating it to the rest of the experience, therefore we decided to cut the scene out entirely.The team also wanted to address the fact that playtesters were having a hard time recognizing their role in our experience, so we decided to stop all work on Incident 1 so Stephanie could rework it. In the meantime, the team decided to tackle Incident 4 due to the fact that it is the longest and most detailed scene. Also, because it is the climax of the story, we want to be able to playtest a prototype that most resembles the finished product as soon as possible.

We decided that to better allow the production team to work simultaneously, we need to have all the lineart done first for the entire experience. With the pre compositions of the scenes, Wenyu can create a background while Cewon works on the character lineart. Then the programmers can begin to assemble the scenes without color. The programmers are implementing the characters in the scenes statically at first, and then going back and adding small movement to make each scene look more lively. This way we know that we will have full scenes as the base and can build from there. Ladera is beginning to do this with the completed art for Incident 4. Mahar worked on programming different UI elements, such as a timer, and Wenyu also took on the task of visually designing the different UI elements that we need for the experience. Cewon is currently done with over half of the lineart for Incident 4.

The dialogue was also a concern for many, so Kirsten took the storyboard for Incident 2 and the composed shots from Incident 4, and working with the script, added the dialogue to each incident in a Powerpoint format. This helped the team visualize how the dialogue would look in each scene and also helped to condense and streamline the dialogue. On Wednesday and Friday, Anthony Daniels came into our project room to look through each Powerpoint, working with Kirsten and Stephanie on making the dialogue for Incidents 2 and 4 more realistic and fluid.

On Friday the team spent time preparing for the photoshoot with the drama students on Sunday. With this photoshoot the team plans on taking all the remaining pictures needed for the artists.

Next Week:

After the photoshoot, Kirsten will work with Wenyu to work on creating the precomposition for Incidents 1 and 2. By the beginning of next week, the lineart for Incident 4 should be complete. After the pre compositions are done, the lineart for Incidents 1 and 2 can be started. With the completion of the line art for Incident 4, Wenyu can receive a color composition and can finalize the backgrounds for Incident 4. Next Saturday is a playtest day, so the team will be working hard all week to get Incident 4 ready to playtest. Also, the team wants to have a name for the product finalized by next week.

Week 7

This week, the Patronus team completed the storyboards for all 4 scenes and updated the scene scripts according to the playtest feedback received the week prior from the main campus team. The main campus team used the scripts to add dialogue to the posted storyboards, which helped give their playtesters a more accurate view of what the final product will look like. Wenyu also began work on creating the threepanel structures for the intervention choice screens. He has completed the first iteration of the 4 intervention points using the previous storyboard pictures to show the possible choices the guest can choose. These pictures can then be integrated into the storyboards to help simulate the final product through the future playtesting even closer.

On Sunday, Cewon, Wenyu, Stephanie and Kirsten met with the drama students for three hours and took photo references for Incident 4. Cewon, Wenyu, and Stephanie got to the green screen room early to set up the lighting atmosphere and any needed props for the scene. Due to last minute schedule conflicts, one drama student was unable to attend and we had to adjust what we planned on shooting. It was still a productive session; we shot most of incident 4 with the actors that did attend and scheduled Sunday March 22nd to finish shooting the rest of the story.

On Monday, Kirsten and Stephanie had a productive script meeting with Talia Shea Levin. Talia is a senior in the school of drama and is currently enrolled in Chris Klug’s writing course. She had read the team’s very first iteration of the story scripts and had very insightful feedback. Some of her concerns were already changed based on the playtester feedback from the main campus team, and she seemed happy with changes that were made. Overall, Stephanie and Kirsten feel that Talia’s notes are extremely helpful and are looking at the scripts to do another iteration based on some of her feedback. The programmers were also able to get into contact with Brian Stuper, the server admin of CMU Campus Affairs. Stephanie, Mahar, and Ladera had a phone conversation with him about some of the logistics of hosting the eventual Morality Play application on the server. We learned that the PHP and MySQL that the programmers have been working with so far are compatible with the CMU server and that Brian could grant us access and space on their test servers to check that the behavior of our code runs as expected. Mahar and Ladera can continue to implement features, then zip the code and send it to Brian, who will upload the code onto the test server at a URL the team can access to confirm the application works as expected.

Next Week:

This newsletter covers both Week 7 and Week 8, as four out of the six members of Patronus will be attending the Game Developers Conference from Tuesday on. For the remainder of Week 8, only Kirsten and Ladera will remain in Pittsburgh to continue work on the project. Kirsten will continue to attend the main campus class, begin indepth work on the soundscapes for the application, and start putting together the team’s halves presentation. Ladera will work on implementing the wireframe and backend data collection. Following Week 8 will be CMU’s spring break. However, Patronus’s 1/2s presentations are on the Monday of the week immediately after spring break, so the team will be preparing their presentation during spring break itself. The next newsletter will be posted at the end of Week 9, after 1/2s have been concluded.