Development Log
Week 3: 1/24/16 – 1/29/16
This week, Phantasm dove headfirst into creating interaction demos in Unity with various interfaces. Our programmer Sarvesh explored the Myo armband, making a pick up and point-to-travel mechanic. Another programmer, Jason, looked into the Google Tango tablet, creating a prototype that uses the tablet to track guest position in addition to the head tracking of the Oculus. Our last programmer, Allyn, initially explored the LeapMotion. But when that proved too limiting, he moved to the Razer Hydra controllers and made a prototype for joystick movement and hand manipulation.
On the art end, our 3D artist Tina was able to find some free rigged models online and use them to animate some of the movements we aim to include in the experience, seeing how they look and feel in virtual reality. Together, the team was able to come to a couple of main mechanics we wanted to include: searching and picking up, as well as travelling by rail hooks. With these, the beginning of our story direction could be settled.
On Wednesday, the team was able to sit down and call Matt Kinsella about our progress as well as ask more clarification questions about any constraints on the project. He emphasized that Legendary’s desires and expectations for the project are much more rooted in innovation and integrating interaction meaningfully into storytelling, and that technological accessibility and closely sticking to source material are less important. Phantasm now has weekly scheduled calls with Matt on Wednesdays 6 PM EST.
Lastly, our UI/UX artist Jun has been working on Phantasm’s branding art. While our poster and half sheet are still in progress, our logo is somewhat simplified and complete, and is shown below.
Next week:
Phantasm’s branding art will be completed next week, with an art critique with other ETC project teams on Monday. We will also move into bringing the programmers into one common code base, focusing on integrating the desired mechanics and technology together to begin coding the beginnings of our final project in Unreal Engine 4. We are also looking to flesh out our story components and find some higher resolution rigged models to continue animating for our final project. Finally, Phantasm will begin preparations for our quarters walkarounds at the beginning of week 5, where ETC faculty will get the opportunity to see all the student projects in progress.
Week 2: 1/18/16 – 1/22/16
This week was Phantasm’s first full weekly sprint, having received a more definitive specification and desired deliverable the week before. Phantasm’s sprints will be weekly, reviewing each week what needs to be done during that sprint and how it needs to fit into the semester’s work as a whole. Scrum occurs every work day, and each sprint ends in a retrospective that lets the team evaluate their work and progress for each sprint.
The team focused this week on brainstorming central mechanics and setting. Legendary had suggested a high level setting along with the IP last week, but the team wanted to work through what aspects of it would be the most useful and most convenient for central mechanics we wanted to create. Some of the mechanics we considered included photography, collecting, driving, walking, and more. To test how some of these mechanics felt, the programmers of the team set out to make quick prototypes in Unity using technology such as the Myo armband, the LeapMotion, and a smartphone’s sensor hub.
Next week:
Phantasm will hopefully choose a main mechanical interaction for a guest in their final experience next week, as well as a concrete high level story direction. We will also continue our technical prototypes with the various interfaces available to us (including some new interfaces such as the Google Tango tablet), combining them with our brainstormed mechanics. We will also begin our first pass of branding art for a project poster, logo, and distributable half sheet.
Week 1: 1/11/16 – 1/15/16
This week was the first of our semester long project with Legendary Pictures. We set up weekly faculty meetings; our meetings with our faculty instructors, Brenda Harger and Chris Klug, will occur on Mondays from 1:30 pm to 2:30 pm.
Together, the members of the student team came together and chose a project name that would represent our team for the semester: Phantasm.
We set our weekly core hours, where all members of the team will be together to do work on Inksmith. They are as follows:
- Mon: 1 PM – 8 PM (7 hrs)
- Wed: 2:30 PM – 9 PM (6.5 hrs)
- Thurs: 1 PM – 3:30 PM (2.5 hrs)
- Fri: 11 AM – 8 PM (9 hrs)
We have also set up a scrum board and have begun to put small tasks up. Stand ups will typically be at 1 pm, barring scheduling conflicts.
On Thursday afternoon, we got the opportunity to speak with a representative from Legendary for the first time: Matthew Kinsella. The team introduced themselves, and we got our first guidelines for the interactive VR experience that we would be creating this semester, giving us the IP we would be working with as well as some very high level story concepts. However, Legendary has given us almost full autonomy in the rest of development, particularly in the ways that we can make the experience interactive, both in real life interface and in the way events play out in the experience.
Next week:
Phantasm will begin weekly sprints next week, now that we have a clearer idea of our goal for our narrative and product. We will start brainstorming and quickly prototyping different interfaces for our VR experience, including things like the Myo armbands, phone screens, and more. We’ll also be brainstorming different plots and storylines that can more fully utilize the VR medium, and hopefully receive some resources from Legendary to allow our artists to begin working on our product’s aesthetic. We will also begin Phantasm’s branding art for our poster, half-sheet, and logo.