Week 3

Hello and welcome to Team Sweet Talk’s week 3 newsletter!

This week was spent in finishing our branding material which includes our team photo, website, poster, half-sheet. We shared our work with our project instructors both at SV campus and back in Pittsburgh for critique and feedback. Based on the feedback we made the necessary changes and have a final version up for review with our peers on Monday.

In the adviser team meeting, we discussed and skinned down all our ideas and decided to focus on three themes.

1. Command and Delegate experience Based off
   1. Tower Defence
   2. RTS styled command your army experience
   3. Cooking or Resource management game
2. Companion / Pet experience (Verbal / Non-verbal / Semi-verbal)
   1. Combat based pet game
   2. Pet training experience
   3. Survival experience via branched dialogue against a large creature
3. Building / Training an AI – switching into different modes
   1. Something similar to Firewatch – AI lead

So the plan for the week was to work further on the ideas by approaching them from various perspectives, like for the first prompt we took a board game approach while for the third prompt we checked whether the voice interactions felt good or not. For the third experience, we tried to reverse engineer Fire Watch and learn building various elements true to that genre.

This week, we touched base with team Campfire from Pittsburgh who is working with voice interface to share our experiences so far, and to no surprise, we did run into similar problems. We tried to learn more about the tech as to which device supports spatial sound and how could we build an experience around voice recordings.

On the tech side, we have a working prototype on the Vive with voice integration. The experience is built around a pet-like character that responds to your voice and actions in the VR world. We also got access to a few VR demos on Vive, thanks to our instructors. We spent a lot of time exploring existing experiences in VR this week.

Thanks for visiting; please feel free to check our newsletter section next week for more updates!