This week, Inksmith continued its development of our first prototype. We updated our storyboards to delve into a more extensive list of possible interactions per scene, which are placed around our project room and up on our Google Drive. From these, we prioritized which interactions felt more varied, more interesting, and hopefully, more fun for children. We noted these and started to work on implementing them in our Unity scene.
In Unity itself, we were able to string all lines of dialogue in two out of three of the main sections of the story together. Rather than sticking to a page-flipping format, Inksmith made a conscious decision to instead go with more cinematic transitions. In our prototype, each scene takes place in a different location of the house, and we use camera transitions to move from location to location. A rough diagram of our floor plan is shown below.
In each of those scenes, our artists have begun modeling the basic objects we need in them. Many scenes right now are still empty, but we will hopefully have most of them filled with at least one object by the end of next week. We do have all implemented scenes with the narration of the lines playing, as well as some music backing a few scenes. A select few also have simple interactions programmed in, such as tapping causing sounds to be played, or color shifts to happen.
In order to facilitate quick playtests of our prototypes, we’ve shared our TestFlight account with Josie, who would then be able to give our prototype build to her daughters to go through. Given that our prototype is still quite barebones right now, there won’t be much testing to see if it is “fun” or “engaging”, but can still tell us what is initially visually interesting, if children like the camera movement transitions, etc.
In regards to Inksmith’s branding, we have completed the art for our poster, half-sheet, and logo! These are shown below.
Half-sheet front, Half-sheet back, Poster
Next week:
On Wednesday of next week, we have our quarters walkarounds. These are brief ungraded presentations of our work to faculty to see the current trajectory of the project, and allow them the opportunity to chime in with feedback on the likelihood of our success and any advice for improvement. On the following day, we will have individual process grades with our faculty instructors about our opinions of our project and its progress.
We will also be completing our first prototype by this Friday as our hard deadline. Some of the main things we will need to implement in time are a title and ending sequence, some kind of “collection” mechanism at the end, and turning narration on and off. Hopefully, we will have built up a good template framework for interactive storybooks that will serve us in our future prototypes, which should accelerate our production rate during the rest of the semester. We will be testing our finished prototype on Friday once more at the children’s museum to see how our interactions have progressed.