Hello hope everyone is doing well out there in the world!

Moving forward this week we are

-1) Continuing design on Chapter 2

-2) Testing remote play testing within our team to gauge how we can enable play testing with others outside the group

Previously Jessica Hammer suggested we make some design changes to to the beginning of the chapter, so we went back to the drawing board and created a flow chart to set up the scene smoothly.

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We added a transition scene between chapters using a montage to preface the players on their characters history and establish the change in their relationship over time.

We are also currently adding changes to the environment scenes and directing players on role playing by only displaying the objects we want them to interact with.

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Ryan also had the chance to set up Test Flight, a remote play testing app introduced to us by our instructors, and realized that it doesn’t work well for our purposes. Therefore we decided to create a guide and have play testers build the app on their own devices and play test in the future.

This week our team…

Derek – Making Chapter 2 design changes

Sally – Created more flower assets for Chapter 2

Ryan – Implemented Chapter 2 transition from Chapter 1 and working on the logic skeleton on Chapter 2

Minz – Created new UI graphics for Chapter 2

Chelsea – Creating environment layout design and set pieces.

To stay on schedule we are planning to wrap up design on Chapter 2 at the end of next week and start production on Chapter 3.

That’s all folks! Hope everyone out there is staying safe!

We just came back from Spring Break and we are just getting used to our new set up now that we are continuing with the project and working remotely.

We don’t have a lot to update this week except getting used to the new workflow that we assembled, getting our equipment from the ETC, and paper prototyping and setting up the next chapter.

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This week we are…

Derek – Paper prototyping Chapter 2 Mechanics

Sally – Remote gold spike and Chapter 2 design assistance

Ryan – Implemented Chapter 0 into the build

Minz – New UI creation for chapter 0

Chelsea – Remote gold spike

We briefly met with Jessica Hammer this week and sought out some feedback for our Chapter 2 designs and changes to the project goals.

Since we are likely not going to be attending ACM IMX this year we have to prepare for presenting our current work in other ways remotely. We are cutting design pillars and moving forward with capturing the game through video. Hopefully we can make it back into the ETC before the semester ends!

The biggest challenges for this week were

-1) Final preparations and rehearsals for Halves

-2) Getting our new demo space ready

We successfully presented our halves presentation to get faculty up to speed on the progress of our project. We got a lot of feedback about what we can do to improve the projects and what our team can do to be better for Softs at the end of the semester.

We don’t have any updates on the project aside from getting a new space to showcase our demo for future play-testers and prepare us for how we want to set up in Barcelona.

All and all we decided to take it easier this week after presentations and during Spring Break as we now have an extra week due to the cancellation of GDC and SXSW.

Have a Happy Spring Break!

The biggest challenges this week were

-1) Finalizing Chapter One

-2) Complete the on-boarding for chapter one

-3) Preparing for Halves presentation

Halves presentations are coming up and we are starting to finalize the chapter one prototype as we’re shifting gears for production soon. We also recently learned that GDC (Games Developers Conference) has been postponed therefore we’re given more time to work on the project with the team now here for an extra week.

We were also able to outline the flow chart of the finalized version of Chapter One and we can use that as the building blocks for the Chapters going forwards. This will help us better explain the story so we can receive better feedback while also making sure the team is on the same page.

Last week we received more feedback that there was still more work to be done to learn the mechanics therefore we worked on introducing an on-boarding phase to prepare guests with instructions on how to play the game. We made further development on the UI and we added a new mechanic where players can now play the violin on the iPad. Something that many people expressed desire to do in our game.

To better prompt the players to look at the screen we added a new typing feedback effect to the instructions so that they become more aware of the changes on the screen and once role playing begins we turned off the camera function so they can recognize when we want them to role play. Now players will hear typewriter sounds and see a typing animation in the UI so they will notice when there is new dialogue to be read.

Everyone is hard at work as we each focus on our own individual tasks so we are ready for Halves.

Derek – Worked on the paper prototype for on-boarding.

Sally – Started preparation on halves presentation and acquired a new space to set up our demo.

Ryan – Programmed new violin mechanic and added more UI feedback.

Minz – Updated UI and worked with Derek on on-boarding paper prototype.

Chelsea – Created a violin model for new game mechanic.

This week we also had the opportunity to meet Tess Tanenbaum from University of California Irvine who was on campus to talk about her experience with mixed reality. She gave us a lot of feedback on our current build and how we can improve on the overall role playing experience.

Now that halves is quickly approaching we split our times working on the build and getting ready for the halves presentation. We revised it numerous times with our faculty advisers and Jessica Hammer in order to best convey what our project is about and how we got to where we are now.

After halves is the start of spring break and we will finally start building the final chapters of our demo and start preparing our materials for the conference in June.