Quarters and Sitdowns!
In the ETC, we have a chance to showcase our work to faculty in week 4. We had all faculty members come in to talk with us about our current project direction and progress, and they gave constructive feedback as to what could be improved. After that, we were able to talk with 3~4 faculty who are interested in our project more deeply.
Fortunately, we received mostly positive feedback about our design concept recreating AR version of Hill District and time travel to the specific decades. Especially, they were excited about giving a context about the plays to students, and the possibility of taking advantage of the physicality of the map in the classroom setting.
Major concerns were about storytelling, AR and our project scope. If our team go too far in the storytelling direction, we might try to replace the original plays instead of augmenting the plays and that is not our goal and mission. About the AR, most of faculty felt that our usage of AR is still shallow and rough and did not agree with the necessity of AR in our application. In addition, many of them worried about the vision to recreate 3 different time periods because it will be very challenging in our timeline. We should find a way to cut it down and settle on a realistic project scope.
After the quarters meeting, our team made a decision to focus on a 2D-based storytelling experience first and then created a situational episode compatible with the game mechanic rather than narrative storyline. Those episodes will be inspired by August Wilson’s plays, and the user can learn the historical context and information naturally through completing the quests. To summarize, we are going to pick one or two important moments in time and then create a dramatic situation in which a user needs to solve the problem. Our narrative designer, Em will work on storyline from next week, and we hope that we can have more solid content next week.
In the meantime, our artists started exploring 2D background and character art. They will create a background art based on Teenie Harris photos, and August Wilson’s Broadway play set design.
We also began to create our first AR demo to figure out the physical map and AR interaction flow. Enjoy our first demo video!