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.