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This week was all about story. We narrowed down our top two stories and began fleshing them out. One story was about Randy as an intern for Mayor Clayton. We liked this idea because above all, it gave Randy a reason to be handing out pillows in the first place. In this story Randy mishears Mayor Clayton when he says “hand pillows out” to “hide pillows”, however as we started to develop this we struggled with the dialogue and chain of events.

In another story, Randy is a squirrel who likes to cook, but every time she tries making the super acorn it turns into a pillow; so it’s up to the child to help Randy bake the super acorn. We liked this one a lot and managed to fully develop it and write a script. Later on in the week we met with our instructors and they gave us some great advice on shifting it so that it’s not a recipe their trying to complete, but rather, a check list to make sure the pillow is made just for them. The current script is the following:

A Visit To Randi And The Pillow Tree

Towards the end of the week a couple of our teammates were unable to make it to core hours because of class and unexpected commitments, but with everything going on, we’re happy we were also able to complete the storyboards for this story!

Next week is GDC, so we will be short one member. We hope to create a rough cut video of the storyboards with some voice recordings and playtest again, as well as getting in touch with the artist helping us with the 2D animation.

This week we had ¼ walk around on Monday. We got some great feedback including keeping the experience upbeat and lighthearted, while still not losing the meaning of the pillow. From there we started to really focus on the story and how Randy relates to the story. We met with both classmates and professors to help guide us in the right direction.

We started by thinking of building of the world first and started thinking of the backstory of the pillow tree. However, after meeting with our classmate, we decided to start with developing Randy first. After doing research on comedy tropes, we decided to make Randy mysterious and like a Harlequin character from Comedia Dell’Arte.

On Friday we had our quarter sit downs where we got some great new perspectives on what we should do with the pillow tree and a definite concern was brought up: what if the worst case scenario happens and we an artist can’t help animate this in time for installation? We are still considering the possibly, but if that is the case some things we can do is have extremely simple animation, have a puppet and have the interaction be a video, or even have the animation just be a story book and there be still 2D images. We are hoping the get in contact with the artist soon. Another thing that was brought up was the possibility of going back down to the village and making sure we are able to implement all the physical changes as well.

Next week we are hoping the get in contact with the artist, talk about going back down there, build the playtesting prototype, playtest again but with story, lock down a rough draft of story, and complete the physical tree concept.