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.