As we made a major change last week, our team started to implement new features that we designed this week. While artists were working on creating new assets, our programmer was mainly working on AR-2D transition effects and new touch interaction. We removed the avatar from the scene to encourage the user to directly interact with objects in the scene. People can have more freedom to explore the world and interact with the whole 3D environment as rendered in AR, i.e., the 3D buildings.
Art has begun to work on more detailed sketches and coloring of the 2D background, attempting to deliver the authentic feeling of the time period. We also are working on the 3D environment this week. Shera found some reference images of the Hill District environment and similar 3D model assets from the market. We purchased an apartment building pack, animated photo book, and old house models this week. Here is our 1969 Hill District 3D environment layout and Shera will add more details including building signs and billboards next week.
Looking at storytelling, we had a restriction to avoid use of August Wilson’s plays as a direct reference because of the legal issue with Netflix. We were planning to use key dialogue from August Wilson’s original play to have a better connection with his work but we needed to think about another direction to avoid the legal issues. We decided to rewrite our dialogue based on the original dialogue. However, it is very hard to catch the black vernacular in the specific time period, and so we might need a mentor who could proofread our dialogue.
Lastly, we are placing placeholder UI in our prototype now to be able to playtest our game in the Nov 9-11 time window. We are preparing to playtest with faculty and high schoolers soon to validate our core design idea and mechanic. To sum up, our team set more strict deadlines to quickly build up our new prototype for the playtest period.