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Detailed below is our postmortem. 1. Introduction and overview of the project Project Thin Line is a mobile VR experience dealing with women’s reproductive rights. Through the use of interactive narrative, we aimed to encourage healthcare providers to identify their biases towards women who had an abortion, evoke empathy, and raise discussion around this topic. 2. What went well (or what went right) 2.1. Pre-production Being a pitch project, some parts of the pre-production happened before the semester started. For […]

In this week, we finished our final presentation. We made final adjustments to the product, including making the phone call voice over spatial, so that the first time VR players could have a “wow” moment. We published our final product on the Google Play store, and we planned to port it to Oculus Rift in the next week to reach a broader audience. The whole experience can now be downloaded from Google Play store.  

This week we brought our product to Dr. Judy, a couple of medical students, and an abortion clinic for playtest. We also had an Open House on Friday, and playtested with 24 individuals, including CMU students, faculties, film makers, and professional game developers and designers. We conducted two sets of tests: Our user test showed promising results that most of our players were trying VR and Daydream for the first time, but almost all of them have no trouble going through the […]

Preparations for softs. With two more weeks to go, there is a lot to be done. However, every day more and more things are being added. As performance is an issue with the Google Daydream, we are baking the lighting and not using more than one light source per room. However, so far we have been using Airmore in order to reflect what the player sees, which also hurts the performance. Recent code structure changes allow us to focus on polishing […]

In week 12 we made more progress towards the finished product. As art assets are being finalized, the code was re-written in order to allow easy implementation of the new assets. We also hired voice actors to play the role of the main character (Jane), her father and the three doctors Jane encounters. Since each interaction would be accompanied by an animation, we went to CMU’s robotics lab and had a motion capture session. However, due to the unforeseen circumstances, we were unable […]

This week we had a few interesting playtesters. The first of which was a group from UPMC’s research facility. We showed them a shortened version of the experience including answering a phone call at the start, three interactions in the living room and one doctor’s office. That was the first time we tried the experience on six people at the same time. That showed us that we need to practice on how to ease people into a mobile VR experience, specifically […]

This week we’ve made progress on several fronts towards the finished product: Design: New design docs for all the objects! After finalizing the list of objects and before writing the relevant code for them, new design docs were added for each one of the objects detailing the flow of interactions. Art: New living room! Out with the old and in with the new. So far the rooms have been placeholders and now we finally have our customized living room. Next on the agenda […]

Week 9 was spent in preparation for halves presentation, finalizing parts of the script, the environment, and starting to work on final art assets. From the various questioners and playtests, we’ve made we have identified what are the key qualities people relate to in our character. We noticed that she is relatable when she is weak but also when she gains control at the end. We kept her a medical student, sharing a similar ambition with our target audience.   […]

For this week, we focused on having a full structure to test in our VR experience. Until now, we tested mainly the 1st phase of our experience, which is the phase where users pick up objects that reveal parts of the women’s past. We had one scene for the 2nd phase, the memory related to the abortion, but it was mainly to test the transition and the flow of the experience In this week’s prototype, we wanted to implement the […]

This week, we decided to complete 2/3 of the story flow of the entire experience, a rough version of course. We added another doctor scene and a new room scene. Now player can go through living room-doctor-bed room-doctor-end. We created a new interaction with the Polaroid we had in the game–now players can take pictures while watching the animation and listening to the voice over–to provide another element of gameplay. On Monday, we had filmmaker and writer Lance Weiler sitting with us and […]