WEEK3 – BRANDING & STORYBOARD

Story

During the team meeting with the faculty member on Monday, we presented the two polished story, the cursed story and reincarnation story. After discussion, we figured out that the cursed story was better developed and had more insights, so we decided to go on with the cursed story. However, there was still questions remained for the story as following:

• How to motivate the player to pick the dead flower?
• How to show the escalation of the creature consuming the flower?
• How to motivate the player to think about the dilemma?

Starting from that, our team focused on details of indirect control and mechanics to solve these problems. For the first problem, we add a lot movement to the creature to make it keep eye contact with the player and react with player’s movement. Also after the flower is given to the creature, it will become excited and cute to let the player feel that he is generous. For the second problem, we reduce the flower change to twice. And during each flower picking, there will be an obvious energy absorbing particle from player’s hand to the flower, the coloring of each flower will have a subtle change. For the final dilemma, we decided to create a lonely/hopeless moment where the player will feel desperate in the environment which will motivate him to do the choice at the end.

The following is our storyboard:

Emotional Arc:

Confused => Sympathy => Generous => Threatened => Surprise => Lonely/Fear => Dilemma

Art reference:

Sound reference:

We pitched our story with Anthony Daniels and Oculus Studio team on Friday, and got some useful feedback on simplicity and critical moment of the story. The Oculus Studio team suggested that we should pay attention to our character design to be cute, and make a natural transformation moment. Our team will focus on prototyping on that next week.

Branding

This week we finished our team description, team photo, poster, ½ sheet, all of them are ready for critique next week

Programming & Prototyping

We continued to research Unreal 4 engine and started to setup the first level in the engine. Also our graphics engineer is working on reflection shader, which is an important feature in our story.

For next week, we will focus on prototyping on our character and transformation moment of our story to test if it is feasible or not. For branding, we will finish polishing all the materials next week.