WEEK5 – QUARTER \((^^))/

Happy Quarter Walkrounds! It has been a great time talking to EA employees and received a lot useful feedback from them. We also visited Oculus Story Studio this Friday, watched their awesome demo and learned how these professionals try to tackle down emotion engaging storytelling in VR space. There is a lot to learn and think this week.

¼ Walkrounds

We presented our quarter walkrounds on Wednesday, we presented our storyboard and showed transformation demo. The detailed walkthrough video can be found below:

Throughout the whole walkrounds, we get around 20 guests and received a lot feedback afterwards. For playtest we prepared questions as following:

        ● How do you feel about the story?

        ● What’s the most interesting part of the story?

        ● Which frame/moment make you feel the strongest?

        ● What does this remind you of?

        ● What do you think about the ending of this experience?

        ● What do you think happens after that?

        ● Which part of the story is the demo trying to illustrate?

        ● Do you feel the scale change?

        ● Any suggestion on making the demo to be better?

These questions fall into three categories: Story, Emotional Moment and Demo. And we get rich feedback on all the three parts which is very successful.

For story, almost all of our guests understood what we are trying to achieve and think the story is interesting. One guest thought the best quality for our story was the fact that we let the player feel the process of gain and lost, which is a great source of emotion. For the setting of the story, it is interesting to know that people had different opinions on whether the setting should be dark or not. Some guests didn’t feel the dilemma at the end since they think it’s not strong enough to show the sequence of tricking another human. We also got some feedback on we need to motivate the player to pick up the flower even if the player feels defensive in such environment. Overall, the story is appreciated and loved by most of our guests and they look forward to see the completed experience, which is a good news for us.

For the strongest emotion and moment, most guests chose the transformation scene, the surprise moment and confusion should be strongest. Also the ending is another moment that was mentioned mostly be our guests. The third important moment will be the twist between two flower picking, that is the part should make player feel alert and confused. The ranking aligns with our expectation of the story scene priority.

For the demo, over half of the player recognized the transformation and feeled the scaling, there is still a lot to improve though. First, we need more reference, especially we need to establish player’s sense of the height at start. Secondly, our monster should be moving from left to the pond instead of walking straight, which otherwise will make the player feel less of presence in the scene. Thirdly, the pacing should be adjusted and the scaling should not be linear. Fourth, there should be more to interact in the scene creating a rich feeling of the world. Also, we need to figure out a way to attract player to look into the pond.

Based on these useful feedbacks, we decided to continue to polish the transformation scene and started to make the flower picking scene next week to quick prototype our mechanism and prove our assumption.

Oculus studio visit

For the visit, we consulted Chris, the CG director in Oculus Story Studio. He offered a lot useful suggestion on how to make the world to be rich and indirectly control the player to look at things including lines, audio and visual feedback. For the transformation problem, he confirmed that we were on the right track and things we should not do. For the reflection, he suggested we should pay attention to the frame rate issue. Production-wise, we learned that we can split all the levels in stream to cowork with each other and improve more efficiency. They are all good advices which we can immediately apply to our project

Production

On our side, we have finished our transformation demo before quarter, integrated all the environment and level sequencer into one. After quarters, we have finished the tree model and monster model, and we have integrated them into the scene. We also tried to export a Gear VR version, but the shader is not working correctly and needs fixing. It will be a problem in the future if we want to port to Gear VR, so we will keep an eye on it.

Next

For next week, we are planning to create our character’s animation list and started to create all art assets. We planned to work on the flower picking scene next week and continue to polish the transformation scene. More and more things will be going on and we think we can achieve this!