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.