April 2016

Week 14: 4/18/16 – 4/22/16

Monday of Week 14 was the ETC’s soft openings, where all of the ETC faculty were able to visit Phantasm’s project and go through the experience. In anticipation of softs, we were able to get in a lot of updates to the build that we weren’t able to implement with the previous playtest. We had new character models, an altered climax scene based on a variety of faculty and playtest feedback, and extra character reaction. We got a lot of helpful feedback, with the core message of it boiling down to us being on track with all of the major pieces, with most of the rest of the work getting the small details in. We uploaded the build from our softs presentation onto Box to distribute to Legendary.

Our refinement tasks have been worked on throughout the rest of the week, with facial rigs for various characters completed and animated. Characters are being placed in different locations around the environment, creating a more varied and interesting experience. We have also updated the soundscape for the climax to be timed and spaced out better. Phantasm also received a huge subwoofer, where we will be routing audio for bass during the build up to the climax and enhance the 4D feedback. We are also adding in a beginning splash screen and writing in a new, more straightforward voiceover, which we will be recording next week.

Next week:

Week 15 is the last week of production of the semester, with the ETC Showcase occurring on Wednesday, April 27th. The ETC will have prospective clients and alumni visiting each project. Phantasm will be treating it as an impromptu playtest and a chance to get some feedback on changes made from softs feedback. We plan on recording our new voice over and finalizing the splash screen next week as well. We will also continue to improve on the small details that make the world feel real to complete our refinement tasks.

Week 13: 4/11/16 – 4/15/16

Week 13 was the week before soft openings at the Entertainment Technology Center. Phantasm worked to implement as much of the experience as possible for a playtest on Friday in preparation for the run up to softs. It turned out that our production team bit off a little more than we could chew to get in time for the Friday playtest, so the playtest build ended up being fairly similar to the previous iteration. We were, however, able to include a new, shorter voice over, more sound effects for the climax, new models for the interface, and 4D haptic feedback. The 4D elements, which we devised the morning of the playtest, included a large balloon being pressed against the guest’s back when they are picked up and blowing warm air in the guest’s face.

The playtest was structured similarly to our previous tests: one guest at a time will go through the experience, then fill out a survey. 17 ETC students and faculty participated in our playtest this time around. The results were positive overall, showing general improvement in overall experience and understanding of how to proceed from our previous test. Relatively, there was less emotional investment in the story, though it was still rated fairly highly. Guests liked the environment construction and layout, and typically found characters to be cute or creepy to the levels we desired. The shorter voice over, while better than previous voice over, was still a little long. Players also reported some confusion in knowing if the act of scanning a character was successful. To our delight, the 4D elements were met with overwhelming enthusiasm and heightened the climax for players. Some even suggested getting a large subwoofer to allow players to feel physical shaking and rumbling during the climax as well.

Next week:

Week 14 is the ETC’s soft openings, where all of the ETC faculty come through and critique project work one last time before finals. Ideally, the project could be released as finished during softs, with the goal of only having small refinement left. In this vein, we have decided to cease work from Tina (our 3D) artist, on any modelling work left, focusing her efforts on extra rigging and animation. We will still attempt to finish the last character model with our outsourced 3D artists instead. We also plan on obtaining a large subwoofer to increase the 4D elements of the climax even more.

Week 12: 4/4/16 – 4/8/16

Phantasm spent Week 12 preparing for our visit to Legendary’s office in Burbank. We kept most of our updates between the previous playtest and the trip out fairly minor, changing things like the instruction screens on the interface and fixing bugs in the character AI. In preparation for our trip down to show our work, we fully uploaded all our project files onto Box, where Legendary was able to bring them down into their version of Unreal and play the build. We also downloaded our project onto an external hard drive for safety’s sake.

We flew into LAX Thursday night, with travel and hotel provided by Legendary, and visited Legendary’s office on Friday morning. The team was taken around for a tour of the offices in the morning, then we got the opportunity to meet many heads of Legendary’s departments, such as the comics department, VFX and post-production, marketing, analytics, and more. We learned a lot from their descriptions and conversations with them about their work.

We were then able to have lunch with Matt Geiser, Matt Kinsella, and Ethan Stearns, where the team was able to speak about our experience making our product and the opinions and expertise we’ve formed over the course of the semester. We got a lot of positive feedback from our client, with comments about how alive the environment felt, and how the scope of it was structured. We were able to continue talking with the VR guys after lunch, where they showed us some of the virtual reality demos they created for Pacific Rim. We had a private movie showing in Legendary’s personal theater, and were able to go out for dinner and drinks to end the day. We were sad to only get to spend a day in California, but were glad to get to go out and talk to our clients in their environment, showing off what we do and learn as ETC students.

Next week:

Phantasm will be having another playtest at the end of Week 13, in the run up to the ETC’s soft openings. We hope to have new character art implemented, with a restructured climax to test out. We will also have new audio in for effects and voiceover, and will be playtesting with the ETC faculty and students again.

Week 11: 3/28/16 – 4/2/16

Week 11 was a huge, crunch time lead up to the ETC Playtest Day on Saturday. Despite art for all characters not being complete, Phantasm wanted to be able to test out and iterate the full story with the playtesters coming in. To do this, we ended up using the same character model for all major story beats, just changing texture color and model sizes to differentiate between them. Our 3D artist, Tina, could then animate the same model with the appropriate animations for each story beat.

For the rest of the experience, we updated our interface as well based on feedback from Week 8 playtesting. We have added instruction and information screens to help inform the guest about the tasks they should be doing, with the controllers for the Vive vibrating for extra feedback. We have spaced out and slowed down the climax of the experience, and added in audio for the interface, the character interactions, and radio voiceover, with even some background music to enhance the climax.

We had approximately 30 playtesters come through, aged 11 – 60, with the vast majority of them reporting that their first brush with virtual reality was today, during ETC Playtest Day. We encountered a number of bugs with the character AI, and many guests, despite the voiceover intro, had difficulty figuring out the appropriate actions and way to interact with their environment and the characters around them. However, once guests figured out the correct way to go through the first encounter, they typically made it through the rest of the experience smoothly.

The implemented story beats seemed to be pretty emotionally effective, with the climax being extremely effective for every playtester who got through it. One woman was so surprised, she ended up throwing the Vive headset off her head completely when she reached the climax. Even with this audience, we still had very little reported nausea. Overall, playtesters reported extremely positive feedback to the experience, with the climax overwhelmingly being the favorite part.

Next week:

On Thursday of Week 12, we will be flying out to Burbank to visit Legendary’s office. There, the team will meet with several of Legendary’s executives, share our experience with the employees there, and finally meet the team that we’ve been speaking to and working with in person. We have a full day itinerary planned, being toured around the headquarters and speaking about our work, and finishing off the day with dinner and drinks. We will be putting in some small updates to the project and uploading our project files to Box so we can run the experience in California.

Week 10: 3/21/16 – 3/25/16

Week 10 was the ETC’s week of halves presentations, where project teams present to the ETC student and faculty body about their project, its progress in the first half of the semester, difficulties they encountered and how they plan to overcome them, and their plans for the rest of the semester. Phantasm’s halves presentation was on Monday, the first team to present. The presentation went smoothly and was pretty well received. The main concern from the faculty was Phantasm’s proposed scheduling, which had active production going all the way into Week 15, leaving little time for error or iteration.

Matt Geiser, CTO of Legendary Entertainment, was in Pittsburgh on Monday to watch our halves presentation and see the experience as we playtested it during Week 8. He enjoyed and was impressed with our progress demonstrated in our presentation, and was very impressed with the demo he got to go through. Matt very generously offered to send a Titan X graphics card to the team to improve our graphics output, as our frame rate is often too low for a virtual reality experience.

We have also decided, in response to concerns about finishing our art on schedule, to recruit from other ETC students who are available and have 3D art experience to help us out. Right now, we have contacted Dave Palumbo and have asked him to create some background characters for our environment to look more alive and populated. Meanwhile, we are preparing to have a trip to Legendary’s headquarters in Burbank at the end of Week 12, and have requested Legendary get an Unreal account to be able to share our deliverable and run it in Burbank.

Next week:

Week 11 will be a lead up to ETC Playtest Day, which takes place on Saturday, April 2nd. It will be a full day event where outside people and playtesters are invited to the ETC to playtest multiple ETC semester projects’ products. These playtesters will be much less well-versed in virtual reality than ETC students, so it will be a good opportunity to make sure our experience is still intuitive and enjoyable for a more mainstream audience. To prepare for the playtest, we’ll be completing the base implementation of all story beats, iterating from our last playtest to improve the interface, and add voiceover introduction and instructions to let the experience stand alone.

Week 8: 2/29/16 – 3/4/16

Week 8 was the week of Phantasm’s first playtest. We conducted our playtest here at the Entertainment Technology Center, and tested our experience with 16 ETC students and faculty. For our playtest, we implemented the hand interface for the guest, and had untextured character models sitting on the floor of the environment for the guest to interact with and pick up. Upon interacting with the characters, the experience goes into its climax and guests have their interactions turned on them and they end up getting picked up themselves. When done with the experience, playtesters could then fill out a survey.

We got a lot of positive feedback about the ambient sound effects, with playtesters reporting a lot of improved immersion from it. A number of playtesters found parts of the hand interface confusing, not sure what effect they were having on the environment and characters around them, and if they were successfully doing what they intended.

Reactions to the climax of the experience ranged from vague surprise to extreme shock, but unanimously, not a single person reported experiencing nausea when getting picked up, though a few felt a little disoriented. We had a lot of people trying to continue to interact the same way they had been doing during the beginning of the experience, and many wanted the climax to be more drawn out and less sudden, but overall, our playtesters reported positive reactions to the experience!

Next week:

After Week 8, the ETC’s spring break occurs, and in week 9, the 2016 Game Developer’s Conference takes place, with half the team attending. Thus, our next main work week will be week 10, which is the week of our halves presentation. Our client at Legendary, Matt Geiser, will be visiting to watch our presentation and take a look at our demo to see our progress and the shape of the final project.