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.