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.