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.