February 2016
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.
Week 6: 2/15/16 – 2/19/16
This week marked Phantasm’s first week of full production this semester. Our story beats and all encounters have been solidified, and our experience design and storyboard creation has begun. Modeling and rigging our characters has also begun; some of it from free low-poly models found online and some being created from scratch now.
Our programmers have also begun working with the Vive and Unreal in earnest. One of our programmers, Allyn, has moved to focus more in technical art and environment design to distribute our art workload. To begin, we have purchased an Unreal environment pack that gives Allyn the tools to start designing the environment and testing out how it feels in the Vive VR environment. In the meantime, our other programmers Sarvesh and Jason are working on manual camera motion, which the Vive is not currently designed for. They are encountering some blocks in this respect, but are focused on working around them.
Phantasm is also working with Legendary to take a planned trip to Legendary’s offices in Burbank. This would occur over the weekend of April 8th, 2016, and would be focused around getting both teams to meet up and familiarize us with each other and everyone’s work related to the project.
Next week:
Next week, Phantasm continues with production. We plan to solve the Vive camera motion problem, set up the environment for the encounters, and start sharing our progress with Legendary using Box.com. We will also be having ETC visiting scholar Michael Keaton coming to visit the ETC and our project, and will go to Schell Games next week to see their team and VR product that they have been working on for Legendary. Lastly, we will begin to plan for playtesting the first iteration of our experience in week 8, seeing what we will have finished by then and how we want to observe them.
Week 5: 2/8/16 – 2/12/16
This week was quarters walkarounds at the Entertainment Technology Center, where faculty come around the various project rooms to give feedback on the progress and future plans of the projects in an ungraded context. On Monday, all ETC faculty came by for the first stage of walkarounds. We put together a brief presentation of our progress so far as well as what we hoped to work on for the rest of the semester, and we also showed our in-progress prototype. We received a lot of feedback as well as resources that could help us out. Faculty members pretty much universally liked our planned interactions for virtual reality and commented on our shown style and tone. On Friday, we had quarters sitdowns, where only two faculty members came to us to discuss more closely and in-depth our experience design and our plans for distributing workflow for 3D art.
Meanwhile, Phantasm received the HTC Vive virtual reality system from Legendary on Tuesday. It was the earliest development version, though Legendary has put a request in for shipping an HTC Pre version to us as well. Our programmers set it up in our project room and have successfully built from Unreal Engine to the Vive, though the frame rate is often very slow.
We have also decided on our story tone together as a team, designed our character encounters throughout the experience, and collected reference art for the environment. Since we have no dedicated sound designers on our project team, Phantasm has decided to outsource our audio work to other ETC students who are not currently associated with any projects, and have contacted them to set up a workflow for them.
Lastly, we have updated our site in the theme of our team branding, and hope to keep improving it as the semester goes on.
Next week:
Next week, we plan to have the specific story beats for each encounter planned out such that we can make the leap into the production phase of our experience. We will begin prototyping our first interaction, and modeling and animating the first character in that encounter. We will also work with Legendary to figure out Unreal Engine licensing and how we can share our progress as it updates throughout the semester.
Week 4: 2/1/16 – 2/5/16
This week, Phantasm finalized its branding art. Our artist Jun attended a branding art critique for some feedback from faculty and students on the branding concepts, and created the finished versions of our poster and informational half sheet below.
Meanwhile, our programmers consolidated their code into one common repository rather than continue creating small, separate prototypes. At the beginning of the week, our plan for the technology for our final project was to use the Hydra controllers and the Google Tango as our main peripherals. However, on Phantasm’s weekly call with Legendary Entertainment, Legendary offered to send the team an htc Vive development kit to work with. We happily accepted, and Legendary has shipped the equipment to the ETC, hopefully to arrive next week. In the meantime, our programmers will focus on better learning Unreal Engine in preparation to integrate the Vive.
We had also decided as a team what our main story beats would be, figuring out the main events and what art assets we should start modeling in preparation for those events. We discussed our plans for main interaction and story direction with Legendary, who were pleased with our outline and ideas. They requested that if possible, the next story focus should be the player character’s narrative and how to visually tell that story in VR.
At the end of the week, Phantasm began preparations for quarters walkarounds, where the ETC faculty will come to see all the ETC projects next week.
Next week:
Our quarters walkarounds will occur on Monday of next week. These are brief, ungraded presentations of our work to faculty to see the current trajectory of the project, and allow them the opportunity to chime in with feedback on the likelihood of our success and any advice for improvement. We will also have individual process grades with our faculty instructors about our opinions of our project and its progress either next week or the week after.
On the production end, we will hopefully receive the equipment for the Vive early next week, allowing us to become more familiar with the physical specs and how coding for its integration in Unreal will work. We will also begin brainstorming ways to tell player backstory through visual VR means and begin creating models and animations that will go into our experience’s main interactions.
Week 3: 1/24/16 – 1/29/16
This week, Phantasm dove headfirst into creating interaction demos in Unity with various interfaces. Our programmer Sarvesh explored the Myo armband, making a pick up and point-to-travel mechanic. Another programmer, Jason, looked into the Google Tango tablet, creating a prototype that uses the tablet to track guest position in addition to the head tracking of the Oculus. Our last programmer, Allyn, initially explored the LeapMotion. But when that proved too limiting, he moved to the Razer Hydra controllers and made a prototype for joystick movement and hand manipulation.
On the art end, our 3D artist Tina was able to find some free rigged models online and use them to animate some of the movements we aim to include in the experience, seeing how they look and feel in virtual reality. Together, the team was able to come to a couple of main mechanics we wanted to include: searching and picking up, as well as travelling by rail hooks. With these, the beginning of our story direction could be settled.
On Wednesday, the team was able to sit down and call Matt Kinsella about our progress as well as ask more clarification questions about any constraints on the project. He emphasized that Legendary’s desires and expectations for the project are much more rooted in innovation and integrating interaction meaningfully into storytelling, and that technological accessibility and closely sticking to source material are less important. Phantasm now has weekly scheduled calls with Matt on Wednesdays 6 PM EST.
Lastly, our UI/UX artist Jun has been working on Phantasm’s branding art. While our poster and half sheet are still in progress, our logo is somewhat simplified and complete, and is shown below.
Next week:
Phantasm’s branding art will be completed next week, with an art critique with other ETC project teams on Monday. We will also move into bringing the programmers into one common code base, focusing on integrating the desired mechanics and technology together to begin coding the beginnings of our final project in Unreal Engine 4. We are also looking to flesh out our story components and find some higher resolution rigged models to continue animating for our final project. Finally, Phantasm will begin preparations for our quarters walkarounds at the beginning of week 5, where ETC faculty will get the opportunity to see all the student projects in progress.
Week 2: 1/18/16 – 1/22/16
This week was Phantasm’s first full weekly sprint, having received a more definitive specification and desired deliverable the week before. Phantasm’s sprints will be weekly, reviewing each week what needs to be done during that sprint and how it needs to fit into the semester’s work as a whole. Scrum occurs every work day, and each sprint ends in a retrospective that lets the team evaluate their work and progress for each sprint.
The team focused this week on brainstorming central mechanics and setting. Legendary had suggested a high level setting along with the IP last week, but the team wanted to work through what aspects of it would be the most useful and most convenient for central mechanics we wanted to create. Some of the mechanics we considered included photography, collecting, driving, walking, and more. To test how some of these mechanics felt, the programmers of the team set out to make quick prototypes in Unity using technology such as the Myo armband, the LeapMotion, and a smartphone’s sensor hub.
Next week:
Phantasm will hopefully choose a main mechanical interaction for a guest in their final experience next week, as well as a concrete high level story direction. We will also continue our technical prototypes with the various interfaces available to us (including some new interfaces such as the Google Tango tablet), combining them with our brainstormed mechanics. We will also begin our first pass of branding art for a project poster, logo, and distributable half sheet.