“There’s only one growth strategy: work hard”
-William Hague

OVERVIEW
Post quarters presentation was the time to rework on the strategy. The team made several decisions to proceed with the selected technology. New milestones are set up in order to follow a systematic pipeline until halves to maximize the production.

PROGRESS
The team decided to go ahead with the tablet as the primary platform, to be specific the best experience will be generated on Android tablets in comparison to the iPads. This decision was taken considering the better computation and vertex shading ability of the latest tegra 4 android tablets. Moreover the iOS developer licensing issue will take sometime and hence keeping in mind the amount of time we have, developing on Android tablets will be helpful. The faculty during quarters suggested that we should stick to making the core underwater experience better to support the realistic art approach as chosen by us. With the basic interaction design and having 3 broad experience design ideas, we have now decided to keep the snapshot idea and also will include quests idea once the core experience is developed up to the mark. Also after talking to the marine expert we have decided to go ahead with the Caribbean sea as our virtual world region to explore, as it has a variety of sea creatures and a colorful underwater world.

We also had a playtesting session with the community tour visitors (age group 16-18yrs old). The prototype was same as the one we had for our quarters presentation. We wanted to evaluate users’ reactions towards the animals feedback when touched. Interestingly, most of the users enjoyed the fish greeting them and introducing itself. We think some form of reaction from the sea animals to user will make the experience fun although it might be a little unrealistic.

The team now has to develop a playable version with good amount of art assets to be made with an experience which is simple and fun. We have set a deadline of March 10, 2014  for ourselves i.e. before spring break. We now have a list of 25 sea animals that live in caribbean. This list includes fish that are dangerous, friendly and some neutral in behaviour. Almost every creature has a unique characteristic like camouflaging, walking, glowing, etc. Out of these we have chosen 10 different variety of animals that our artists will model-rig-animate-texture before the spring break. Along with this a good amount of environment has to be developed (sea bed, coral, plants, etc.) considering the amount of assets to be built, we might buy some environment assets online.

Having a marine expert to validate the information that we collect will be a great help to the team, so we are planning to collaborate with someone soon as an external help.

PROSPECTS
As per the new plan we have following things to do before spring break:

Design

• Interactions with fish both, touch and passive reactions

• Level design (terrain and assets placement)

• Research caribbean (watch documentaries)

• User testing (2 in-house and 1 client-site)

Art

• 10 variety of sea creatures to be developed (modeled, animated, textured)

• environment building (sea bed, corals, plants, random wrecks/objects)

Technology

• Develop the snapshot mechanism

• Incorporate the sea creatures’ AI mechanism

• Work of colliders

• Enhance water environment

Production

• Propose a budget for 31 tablets

• Buy assets online to reduce the workload on artists.

• Update website to make it a useful resource for anyone who wants to know more about the project and its development process.