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.