“Without deadlines and restrictions I just tend to become preoccupied with other things”
-Val Kilmer

OVERVIEW
We refined the experience design to make the interactions more intuitive and natural. Developed a new Snapshot feature and refined the underwater world by implementing it on new tablets specially ordered for this project. The scene is now live with various fish, environment assets and the Caribbean terrain.

PROGRESS
This week the team as per plan worked hard to include lot of new things in the scene. Out of the 6 species of fish 3 species are completely ready with animation and texture. The design was refined to specifically design interactions for the 3 types of fish viz. Friendly, Scary and Special fish. The user will now see the name of the fish when the user touches the fish once. The fish will give visual feedback upon 2nd touch by shaking or wiggling. Special fish and scary fish will react on 3rd touch by showing their special feature or scaring the user respectively. This week we also implemented a new feature of taking snapshots while exploring. We also designed the terrain that matches to the Caribbean Sea bed. Also the work on the colliders is done and now the exploration underwater is much better. This project involves a lot of asset creation like fish, sponges, coral, plants, wrecks, etc. so to include a variety of assets we chose to use some assets available online. We researched on various plants, corals, sponges available online and selected few some to be bought online and some to be developed in-house by the artists.

On another note, our proposal for budget of 32 Android Tablets and its cases was approved and 4 tablets and cases were delivered in the middle of the week. Our new build now runs on these new latest technology and lightweight tablets. We gave a short demo to Ira Fay (Game designer and a prospective ETC faculty candidate) and received some constructive feedback like focusing on how long the experience will last and the interest curve.

PROSPECT
Next week our goal is to have total of 6 fish, 2 sponges, 1 wreck and some plants ready and placed in the underwater world. Sound is something we will work on and also some user interface design for snapshot feature. We will be having 2 playtesting session; 1 on Tuesday in ETC and other on Friday at the client site i.e. with our target audience, students from k-5 of Mountainview Elementary School, Morgantown , WV.