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.

Week 3: 1/26 – 1/30

This week Patronus made progress in further defining our deliverable. We continued our Tuesday/Thursday brain storming sessions on main campus and reached several critical decisions. After research and discussion, everyone was in agreement that the experience should be web based using HTML 5. While our programmers are less experienced in HTML 5 applications, our application will likely handle fairly straightforward interactions, so it should be reasonable to learn for the purposes of our project.

After several passes on the art style, our artists Wenyu and Cewon found the most efficient art style that the main campus class found appealing was a more realistic version using hard shades to stylize the characters. Samples of the style are shown below:

The artists agreed that Cewon will work on the characters while Wenyu will concentrate on the settings. Wenyu is continuing to work on the poster and half sheet design as well.

On Wednesday, Kirsten and Stephanie met with members of the main campus group to discuss the types of characters we want to represent as well as solidify the “teachable moments” that we want in the story. On Thursday we presented our ideas to the class and briefly discussed with everyone what the story group had envisioned. We briefly went through each moment to make sure they were in line with the learning objectives Andy had drafted. We left the class with a list of 9 possible “teachable moments” for Stephanie and Kirsten to further develope by next Tuesday.

On Friday, Patronus discussed what, other than the required items, we can feasibly have ready to show by quarters. On top of the required items, we hope to have a somewhat concrete storyboard to present to the faculty for critique and suggestions.

Finally, this week Stephanie sent out the project description to MaryCatherine to post on the ETC website, and Laxman put our weekly newsletters on the team website. Stephanie also sent out a communication to a game designer, Whitney Beltran, that Patronus’s faculty instructor Chris Klug introduced for more information about meaningful interactions we can use in our product.

Next Week:

For the upcoming week, Kirsten and Stephanie are going to meet with members of the main campus group to talk about the research for the teachable moments, and will have fleshed out story points to bring to class on Tuesday. Patronus wants to get the first pass of the storyboard completed by next week so that we can start defining guest interactions, i.e.: when will the guest interact with the graphic novel, how often will the interactions occur, and what type of interactions the guest will have (dialogue based, timed decision making using multiple choice options, etc). Cewon also wants to start to prototype a character in order to see how long it will take. Once a story has been laid out, Kirsten will begin to look at music and sound fx for the experience. Wenyu will continue to work on the poster and half sheets for quarters and Cewon will work on the team photo.

This week, Patronus received our team url: http://www.etc.cmu.edu/projects/patronus/

Our future weekly updates will be posted on our website, though we will continue to email them out to the team in PDF form over email.

Over the course of the week, we had two classes on Tuesday and Thursday with our undergraduate teammates at CMU’s main campus. We had a big brainstorming session for coming up with as many ideas as possible during our first class, and narrowed our focus during the second. We’ve improved our ability to communicate and bring the undergraduates to a cohesive idea. Together, we’ve decided that our product will take the form of an interactive graphic novel, where the guest will play a bystander that has the ability to intervene and prevent an instance of sexual assault. We would like to inspire a feeling of empowerment in our guests: that as bystanders, they have the privilege and the power to stop incidents of harassment and violence as they witness them.

We came away from the class on Thursday with tasks to give concrete direction to our interactive graphic novel. We are now brainstorming artistic direction, story elements, and pros and cons of various technological platforms that our product will be hosted on.

We had a faculty pass this week for our branding on Friday. To prepare, we had our logo finalized by our artist Cewon, after some feedback from our advisors:

We showed our finalized logo to the ETC faculty, as well as describing to them our choice of the team name Patronus: to act as a protector (patronus in Latin) towards those who suffer the trauma that comes from sexual assault. They liked the direction and logic behind our branding, and urged us to take it further and keep our theming cohesive when coming to the remaining branding materials, such as the poster, half sheets, website, etc. Our other artist, Wenyu, is now coming up with ideas and concepts for the project poster, which will be a reflection of our product goals.

We also received the products that the previous Morality Play projects worked on. While both were informative as to the issue they were trying to bring to light, we found them both unengaging and not cohesive. They provided a good inspiration of ways to improve and pitfalls to avoid for our iteration of Morality Play.

Jesse Schell gave the team a couple different reference materials to look at when considering interactive graphic novels.  He encouraged the team to look into pop-up books for guest interaction inspiration. He also urged the importance of picking a specific platform (phone, tablet, desktop) to concentrate on so that the team is not spreading their efforts too thin.  Finally, Jesse advised ways to structure the production process so that Patronus is not blocked or depending on the undergraduate class in order to continue working on the product.  Once there is a more concrete idea of what the team is making, we plan on implementing such a structure to help the flow of production.

Next week:

For the upcoming week, our team wants to further solidify the concept and the deliverable for our project.  For Tuesday’s class we want to be able to present the undergrads with creative options for them to decide on, and by Thursday want to have a solid story arc with defined “learning moments”.  With an agreed upon art style, story arc and platform, our team can start the prototyping process over the weekend.  Having these concrete ideas will also allow for our artists to continue to develop the team’s branding for our website and poster.

Week 1

This week, the team for the project Morality Play chose a new team name: Patronus. We have established a weekly advisor meeting with Ralph Vituccio and Chris Klug on Monday at 2 pm.

We also set our core hours this week. They are as follows:
M: 11 am 7 pm
T: 12 pm 1 pm
W: 10 am 12 pm, 4 pm 7 pm
Th: 12 pm 1 pm, 5:30 pm 8:30 pm
F: 11 am 7 pm
Scrum will start next week, at 12 for most days, though earlier on Wednesday to avoid class conflict. We have created a scrum board and have begun to put small tasks up. One of our artists, Cewon, has begun making our team logo. She presented some rough concepts to the team that we gave feedback on, and has come up with a few polished possibilities, shown below:

We met with our client, Jessica Klein, as well as the undergraduate students and instructor Andy Norman, on Thursday. Everyone involved introduced  themselves to each other, and Jess gave an in depth introduction into rape culture and myths, and the way that seemingly innocuous actions and comments can contribute to a society that normalizes sexual harassment and assault. She gave us some guidelines towards hopeful goals our project can accomplish, such as primary intervention to prevent sexual assault incidents, encouraging
bystanders to intervene in high risk situations, and educating our users in resources that can help and educate others.
On Friday, our coproducers, Kirsten and Stephanie, attended the Playtest Explore workshop. Prior to the workshop, our whole team came together to brainstorm about the form our product will take, the subjects to focus on, and where and to whom it will be targeted towards. Our visualization is shown below:

At the workshop, we started looking at play testing during the ideation phase in order to help the design team define the design space and clarify the core characteristics of the experience. Prior to the workshop, our team got together to create a composition box. Inside the composition box we wrote the beginning ideas we had for our experience. We unfortunately didn’t get as much feedback as we were hoping, partially because our project is still open ended and perhaps partially due to the subject matter. We learned how to play test with Plex cards, which can be useful both with play testers or just with the group members. The workshop was nice to show the team other ways to ideate and get our core audience/stakeholders involved even in the preproduction phase.
Next week:

Patronus plans on attending the first ideation for the project with the undergraduate class. We plan on discussing the ideas/ practices we learned about during the play test seminar with the rest of the team. We want to come up with several interactions/ platform ideas that could possibly match the concept that is hopefully decided upon by the end of Tuesday’s class. We will continue to research and discuss our vision for the product. We will also choose our final logo early in the week, and get started on the creation of the poster and website. So far we haven’t really experienced any challenges or changes due to the fact that the fundamental elements of our project are still fairly loosely defined.