Our team began developing our first prototype this week. We decided to focus on getting a functional prototype with all interaction pieces including AR map interaction, time travel transition, some story skeleton in 1969, and travel back and forth from 2D scene to AR. We hope we can get advice early from faculty and clients before Halves.
While we are exploring story episodes and quests for the player, we picked the main buildings that our player will interact with to start a 2D story scene and came up with a background story about the player. This will be used as part of our onboarding process, and the player will get the mission and background information about why they start their time travel and what they are going to do. We created a high-level story arc that connects August Wilson and his work, and interaction patterns that map out the user journey in the Hill District area.
Our designers jumped in to create more detailed 2D backgrounds for each place referencing photos from Teenie Harris.
We started a mockup of the UI for the quest and dialogue interaction. We also thought about the navigation control and the information panel in the AR world. For now, we only have a very simple transition effect, but it will be developed as storyline goes on.
We also updated our AR environment using free 3D assets to explore what environments we wanted to include in the game and how we can recreate the Hill District in AR. We started collecting all the photos in the different periods and tried to capture the key elements representing that period. We found that outdoor billboards and cars can make a clear distinction between the 1910s and 1969. However, we also realized that it would be hard to create the whole environment 3D models within 8 weeks timeline. In addition, we do not know how many 2D arts we need to work for the story scene yet, so 3D art assets are a heavy workload for our production schedule. To solve this issue, we discussed buying 3D models including buildings and cars from the market with faculty, and we got approval to buy 3D assets supporting ETC. Our team will work on the 2D story scene first and then find the 3D assets aligning with the 2D art concept and style.
In the meantime, we are preparing our halves presentation and remote user testing! We hope to have a solid design solution and storyline next week and get more feedback in the halves!