Week 7: 2/22/16 – 2/26/16

This week, Phantasm had the opportunity to meet ETC visiting Michael Keaton on Monday. We showed him the work we have done for our project and a small demo we put together with our environment and modeled objects. He was mostly unfamiliar with the particulars of the HTC Vive, but brought interesting perspective as someone who has been well situated and established for many years in the movie industry as to how people will consume VR experiences once they are made and distributed.

We have kept our production going strong in the meantime, sculpting and animating our models, drawing up storyboards of the various encounters, and continuing the code for our in-experience interactions and movement. We have set up our folders on Box and begun to share images of story outlines, storyboards, and videos of animations with Legendary. We visited Schell Games on Wednesday to check out the product they created for Legendary and got a lot of insight into the production of that. We ended up having a similar abstracted story structure as them, which gave us confidence that our story pacing is on the right track.

Meanwhile, we have begun preparing for the playtests next week. We have come together as a team to agree on what we want to include in the playtest experience, and have sent out notice to the ETC to come playtest for us on Wednesday, March 2. We had 15 available slots, and they have all already been filled, so we look forward to getting a lot of feedback to start our iterating process.

Next week:

Next week, Phantasm will have its playtest on Wednesday! We will be testing out the second half of the experience and our UI elements to see if our testers know what actions to take, as well as if the emotional notes are hitting. To prepare, we will finish up the development for the encounters, getting manual camera movement, environment optimization, and sound effects integration in and working.