This week was a short week before the Thanksgiving weekend, but Inksmith was able to perform an analysis of our prototypes and which to proceed with. Animal Serenade is not owned by Pixure Books Publishing, so refining that would not be useful as a publishable deliverable for our client. This left us to consider between Bernie the Bowling Pin and Astronaughty. We ended up choosing Astronaughty for a variety of reasons: we had just developed it, so we were more familiar with the code, and it provided a better framework for print awareness since we created it while we as a team were more aware of it. However, our main reason for choosing it was due to our worry that if we had chosen Bernie, the volume of tasks required to make it refined might not be completable in our remaining two weeks.
With our choice, we drew up a set of refinement tasks that we wanted to accomplish with Astronaughty. We wanted to complete the full story, as we had been unable to include the “cutscene” segments that weren’t directly related to the hide and seek. We wanted to make the avatar customization better staged, with more art assets to choose from. In the hide and seek segments, we wanted to improve object collisions, make all available furniture openable, create random hiding spot distribution for replayability, and make the transition to the next room automatic, among other things.
We met with Josie on Tuesday evening to discuss our decision and plans. She agreed with our choice of continuing development on Astronaughty, and requested us to put aside avatar customization work to focus on more on the hide and seek mechanic and the transitions that would be contained in those scenes.
Next week:
On Monday of next week is the ETC’s soft openings. We will be fielding faculty members and other students throughout the day in our project room to go through our various prototypes as they are implemented thus far. This allows us to get feedback from the ETC faculty about our prototyping process and the insights that we’ve gained throughout the semester. The projects shown at softs are typically considered as if they are finished, shippable products, though since Inksmith is a multiple prototype project with an explicit refinement stage, our current deliverables will be considered in that context.
We will need to finalize what our main transition in Astronaughty will be for our refinement stage, and we will be meeting with Josie on Wednesday to discuss our ideas and how to move forward from there. We otherwise need to simply start our refinement tasks in earnest. We will also be creating promo videos, which detail our project’s goals and process.