This week Team Prism presented our progress at the halfway point to the ETC faculty and fellow students. After weeks of working away in relative privacy, it was super exciting to share our work and vision with the community at large.
Above, programmer Yidi Zhu is talking about our dialogue system and how it advances our forest-crisis narrative.
The team discussed everything we’d done up to this point, including an overview, research on autism and autism awareness efforts, our design process, the prototypes we’ve been working on, the technical challenges of creating a 3D game that’s capable of being played on relatively-weak PCs, audio philosophies and difficulties, playtesting, and more. We had to cover a lot of ground in 15 minutes, and it took a concerted effort to figure out what we had to cut because of time.
Academic presentations tend to be somewhat dry, staid affairs, and the team was very conscious about making sure we delivered a presentation that was both informative and entertaining. To that end, we began our presentation by playing OK Go and Perfume’s collaborative single, “I Don’t Understand You.” With lyrics that highlight a breakdown in communication, we wanted to establish one of the major themes of our project while simultaneously capturing the room’s attention. The subtleties of our choice of music may have been lost on our audience, but they definitely perked up (the song begins with loud power chords) when we began to present.
Next week, we’ll be receiving feedback from the presentation and incorporating it into our design as we continue to iterate on our game. The team is looking forward to a very productive week.