Week 1

Hello readers,
We are Project Mimicus, an interdisciplinary team of students at the Silicon Valley campus of the Entertainment Technology Center. We are working with Google to use cutting edge Machine Learning research to convert videos of human movements into 3D character animations. Our goal is to to design a fun game using this technology while exploring a variety of possible game design applications.

The week started with the team members getting acquainted with each other. We spoke about what everyone’s individual goals for the semester were and what roles we could possibly take up. At this point we had very little idea about what we would be building this semester. We knew that our work would be based on the research paper and so every member on the team started reading the paper. Everyone had different goals while reading the paper. The programmers focused on understanding the technical concepts while others thought about the possible applications of this research.

We were meeting our client on Wednesday, January 16. Our goal for this meeting was to get to know what we are building, why we are building it and who we are building it for.

From the meeting we learned that our goal is to explore a wide variety of possible game design applications using the technology at hand. The client also said they want us to document our design process with special emphasis on what worked and what did not work. Our final deliverable is to make a game that has an interesting game mechanic based on the output of the implementation of the research paper, and detailed documentation of our process. Our client also gave us some game references like Pikmin and Viva Pinata. We ended the week by doing a quantitative brainstorming to get as many ideas as possible on the whiteboard. These ideas were somewhat influenced by the references we had looked up.

The next week for us will be about starting the game design process, identifying the goals, requirements and constraints.