Week 5

A glance at our week

With half presentations staring at us 3 weeks from the future, here’s how the week went for our team.

Let prototypes drive the design direction

Our learning in the past few weeks, our research, and the feedback we got after our quarter’s presentation have convinced us to change our design philosophy. We have decided to let results from our prototyping drive our design decisions. Considering the fact that we are building for a new technology, this approach seems more natural. With this in mind we started brainstorming some ideas for our prototypes. We came up with three simple prototype ideas.

1) Puzzle Prototype

Goal:  Get past all the obstacles and reach the end of the level

Start state: The player is shown the entire level in advance and must upload videos to get past all its obstacles

Rules:

1. Upload the video of movement before the game starts
2. Use any movement whenever needed to get past an obstacle

Obstacles: Crates, boxes, pillars and other obstacles

Storyboards for puzzle prototype

2) Fighting Prototype

Goal:  Defeat enemy

Start state: The player is shown the fighting pattern of the enemy in advance and must upload videos to defeat the robot

Rules:

1. Player can watch the robot’s movements before uploading the videos
2. Player can upload ‘n’ number of moves (Eg. n = 5)
3. Player can adjust the sequence of the moves (which makes n! possible sequences, so 120 possible sequences if n = 5)

Obstacles: The enemy

Storyboards for fighting prototype

3) Storytelling Prototype

Goal:  Create a story with friends

Start state: The players are given a theme, a scene (setting), and a set of words/sentences to describe narrative

Rules:

1. The player must add all components of the game (story/sentences/words, music, videos etc.)
2. Each player is assigned a task that they must complete (shooting videos, sentences, selecting character’s outfit, environment assets etc.)
3. The uploaded videos must each be less than 10 seconds in length

Obstacles: Time limit

Client meeting

On Wednesday Feb 13 we presented our 3 prototype ideas to our client. Our client gave us some valuable feedback which we are using to refine the design of our prototypes.

More iteration on ideas post the client meeting

Art style and character

We decided to choose a human like cat as our main character. The reason for this is that cats are fun and fit well with all of our ideas. This will allow us to prototype faster without spending time on choosing a theme and designing different characters.

Here’s a look at our character. Our character’s appearance can easily be changed by changing the texture, which is a quick process.

One of our artists is currently rigging this character to fit the needs of our machine learning pipeline’s output animation data