Week 14

This Monday, Team Patronus had their soft opening. Faculty came through the project room, played through the experience, and gave us feedback on what they liked and/or what they thought could be better. The full package was running and operational, from the landing and content warning pages given to us by the main campus team to the video testimonials at the end. Overall, Patronus received very positive feedback from the faculty with only minor changes suggested and comments made. The team was able to schedule a wonderful team dinner on Tuesday to celebrate their successful soft opening.

After soft openings, the team sat down and went through the full experience together, going through every branching scenario and taking note of anything that we wished to polish or fix, keeping in mind suggestions from the faculty at softs. We created a task list from all of our comments to complete throughout the next week and a half to create a fully polished product by finals. The ETC Spring Showcase is April 30th, so the team will be working to get as many of these updates in as possible for the showcase.

With all of the primary character, environment, and compositional art complete, Cewon and Wenyu were able to turn their attention to the landing page, the mock facebook pages for the characters, and other UI design items this week because they ended up ahead of schedule at the end of last week. Kirsten and Stephanie met with the main campus class and discussed playtest reviews as well as the promotional event on March 6th, and the written facilitator package. Kirsten and Stephanie also conducted two playtests at main campus on Wednesday with volunteers that were contacted through Jess Klein’s network.

Ladera contacted Brian Stuper and gave him the most recent version of our product to be put on the CMU test server. The team recorded themselves talking about the project to put in the promotional video and Kirsten and Ladera began editing footage for the video.

Next Week:

Next week will be the last week the team has before final presentations. The team will be working hard to implement everything on their task list on time for Thursday’s showcase. The goal is to have a completely finished product by Friday of next week as well as a rough structure for our final presentation.

Kirsten and Ladera will continue to work on the promotional video, while Kirsten and Stephanie also work to make sure the team has all the required elements for their post-mortem, project archive, and website together by the end of the week. We will also follow up with Brian Stuper to make sure the experience is running successfully on the CMU test server.

Week 13

This week, team Patronus interviewed their client Jess Klein as well as her colleague Lucas Christian for their promotional video. They covered topics such as why they liked our product and why they thought it was important to create, how college students are usually taught (or not taught) about how to treat romantic and sexual relationships and how their perception affects their actions, etc. We also captured video of them introducing themselves, explaining how complex an issue sexual assault can be, and how to contact them if any students wanted to talk, which we can place in Decisions that Matter after the main experience.

Other than that, the team was in high gear to finish the product for softs. The team worked hard to finish all the color and audio for the experience as well as implement the ending testimonials. Originally, the team had planned for the color to not be completely implemented for softs. However, we ended being ahead of schedule and completed all major color art assets on Saturday, in time for us to implement the full color version on the test server for softs. Kirsten and Mahar have worked together to create all the ambient noises and sound effects, then implement them in Flash in the background of the various scenes and locations in the graphic novel. Cewon also drew the intro images for all video testimonials, allowing Ladera to place them and the videos into the application in place of the placeholder ending images, while Stephanie filled in the dialogue before the videos. Stephanie also did general QA on Sunday, and the team grabbed some ETCers for informal playtests to see if they noticed anything out of place.

The main campus team also gave us some images for the landing page and content warning page to place before jumping straight into the application. Ladera was able to take the images and implement them in HTML5, putting them on the test server in time for softs.

Next Week:

Next Monday are soft openings for all projects at the ETC. We will be fielding faculty members throughout the day in our project room to go through our full project experience as is implemented thus far, from landing page to video testimonials. We hope to gain a lot of feedback from the ETC faculty going through the particulars of our story structure and our user interface. The products shown at softs are considered as if they are finished, shippable products, and are graded as such.

There are a number of things that we know won’t be finalized by softs, so we will continue working on them in the next two weeks. These are mostly in the introduction and ending framing the actual, graphic novel experience. We have taken the initial landing page and information entering page from the main campus team, but the written descriptions and layouts are only the first iterations. Now that Wenyu and Cewon have completed the bulk of their artistic work for the application itself, they can now look over and edit the way the introduction pages look and are presented. We also need to place the questionnaire at the end of the experience, as well as figure out how to present the credits and show Jess and Lucas speaking to the students of CMU.

The last major component of our product is the facilitator package. We will need to organize the information we are collecting per Andrew ID and hand it over to a discussion facilitator is a way that is easy to understand and organize to best help them give a useful facilitated discussion. Ladera has been in contact with a member of the main campus team, Sam Gao, to create a graphical layout of the choices taken by the students and their written responses for a facilitator. Otherwise, we will continue going through more playtests, and Ladera will also be contacting Brian Stuper to start shifting Decisions that Matter onto the CMU test servers, then onto the CMU production servers.

Week 12: 4/6 – 4/10

On Sunday, we filmed the actors for Luke and Natalie giving their “good” and “bad” ending testimonials for the end of our experience. Kirsten worked to narrow down the takes to the ones we wanted to implement, then Ladera began working on editing the takes.

This week, Team Patronus also finished a completed prototype of the experience. Having a completed prototype has allowed the team to move one to a polishing phase of production, which we also began this week. Being able to see the experience as a whole allows us to get a better feel for the interest curve and the emotional high points. Defining these points let’s us work through the experience as a whole and look at where we need to have animations and more artistic transitions, something we began to do last week but are now more able to concentrate on.

Cewon has completed about 80% of the character coloring for the last incident and plans to have the entire scene colored by the weekend. Wenyu has the background for the last scene colored and has continued to work on UI art for the experience. Kirsten sat with Mahar on Friday and talked about sound implementation and her ideas for the sound design of the experience so that sound implementation can begin next week.

Kirsten and Stephanie have begun communicating with the main campus team, asking if they could help us out with creating what the pre and post experience will look like. They are working on the landing page and content warning, a new loading scene and the tool tips for the experience, the questionnaire, and the exit page. We should have all of these assets to us by early next week so that we can implement them into the experience for softs on 4/20.

On Friday, Dave Bossert from Disney met with the team and we walked him through our experience. He was impressed with the visual presentation of product, and expressed his approval for the experience, letting us know that making this kind of experience mandatory would be very important for new CMU students.

Next Week:

Next week, the team will be working hard to get a polished experience for softs. We will begin to implement and test the soundscape for the experience, as well as implement the colored characters and backgrounds as they get completed. Cewon will have the color for all of the characters done by next week, then Wenyu will switch out the colored images for the line drawings so that the programmers can implement the colored shots. Wenyu will also work on coloring the background for scenes one and two. After the coloring is done, Cewon will work on the art necessary to go with the ending testimonials. While the programmers wait for the art files, they will be working on the panel transitions, in-panel animations, getting the name recognition function implemented and lastly getting the ending testimonials into the experience.

The team will also work on the promotional video next week. We have interviews lined up with our client Jess Klein as well as an associate of hers, Lucas Christain. We are planning to film ourselves on Monday for the video as well. The team is also working on setting up playtests next week. Next Tuesday, the main campus team is working with us to set up a playtest during our class time. Cewon also reached out to a contact, and we will try to pool from our ETC classmates.

In short we are in full hustle mode to get as close to a completed experience by softs.

Week 11: 3/30 – 4/3

This week team Patronus continued to diligently follow the production pipeline to have a prototype for Incident 2 on Friday.  The line art was done early in the week which allowed our programmers to build the scene with a shred of sanity remaining on Friday. We decided to mimic the panel transitions from AMC’s graphic novel “The Prisoner” (http://www.amctv.com/the-prisoner-graphic-novel/) because that would take less reprogramming of the scene manager.  This style is still visually simple, so we agreed to look through each scene and figure out where more dynamic transitions could be implemented to further the visual interest.

As the programmers have been hard at work, Cewon has completed all of the line art for scene two as well as is over 80% done with the line are from scene one.  Wenyu has finished all of the line work for scenes two and three, and is finishing up new environments for scene one.  Wenyu also compiled all of the art assets together to give to the programmers.  He is next beginning to work on the color for the backgrounds.

On Tuesday our client Jess Klein came into the class on main campus to look at our prototype and give feedback on the vision of the product overall.  Overall, she thought that the experience was believable and engaging.  She gave some advice on dialogue and on how to make the last incident even more realistic and answered design questions the team was having.  On Thursday, the main campus team recruited three freshman students to playtest our experience.  Each student signed a consent form so that, using a video camera as well as video and screen capture on laptops, we were able to record the players.  Each playtester experienced both the powerpoint versions of scenes one and two as well as the prototype for scene four.  Overall, the responses were positive and there wasn’t any major issue with the experience that needs to be addressed.  The main campus team agreed that using class time on Thursday for playtesting would be the most helpful way to spend the remainder of the semester.

On Friday, Cewon and Kirsten worked with Ralph to set up the green screen room for filming Spencer who plays Luke and Isabelle who plays Natalie on Sunday.  We will be shooting the ending testimonials which reveal to the player what happened as a result of the intervention or non-intervention.  Working with Ralph, Kirsten and Cewon set up the lighting for the shoot as well as learned how to properly work the camera equipment.  Earlier in the week, Kirsten worked on editing the testimonials to give to the actors for Sunday.

Next Week

Next week, Patronus will follow the same pipeline to finish the prototype for incident one so that we can playtest the full experience by Thursday’s main campus playtest.  Once all the lineart is done, the team will go through the entire experience and see where minor changes need to be made before Cewon begins the color for the characters.  The team will also start to work on identifying where the more artistic transitions for the experience need to go and implementing them.

After filming the actors on Sunday, Kirsten will work with Ladera to edit down the testimonial videos as well as begin to film and put together the team’s promotional video.  By the end of the week next week, Patronus will have a full prototype from scene one to scene three.  From here the team can work on polishing the prototype and creating a richer experience.  Also, we will hopefully have an ETC test server up and running to test the experience for bugs.