This week, True North worked to update and implement our assets into the prototype, in anticipation for our upcoming playtest and Halves’ presentation. We now have the important elements incorporated within the prototype – the latest story draft, updated art assets (most environments, most characters), basic transitions and an integrity scoring system. For this upcoming Spring Break, we will focus on:
Programming: UI implementation (from concepts and design), phone interaction, back end data collection (for choice tracking – playtest purposes)
Art – Character expressions complete, characters in scene
Design / Story – Ways increase player engagement in the climax scene, ways to wrap up the story for each character (using friendship score), ways to show emotional changes in characters outside of new art asset creation (simple animations eg).
Sound – recording ambient noises for the environments as well as general SFX
Production – Playtest preparation, Half Presentation preparation, demo filming
Below lists out some additional details from our production this past week. In our faculty meeting this Friday, we discussed our upcoming presentation, playtest and the prototype so far. At this point, areas of concern relate to increasing user interaction, cleaning up “annoyances” in the visual presentation (UI concepts, for example), as well as story impact in the important scenes. In addition, we touched on the transmedia additions that could help bring more impact for our users. Examples of these would be email or texts generated from the play to break through the “4th wall”. Looking ahead, we will have to work hard to balance accomplishing our goals stated above despite the tough convergence of Spring Break, GDC/SXSW Conferences and Halves.
Design / Story
- Working on visual cues, effects for timed choices,
- UI mockups for dialogue and phone
- animation mock ups for character conversation
- Working on Climax storyboard and interactions to be impactful and a strong moment.
- Draft 7 written from Script table read feedback, with emotion tagging and preliminary point system tagged
Production
- Playtests being conducted on March 14th and 15th
- Halves preparation – deck
- Spring break production plan
Programming
- All scenes are implemented
- Started working on phone interaction
- Limit camera movement
- Prevent user click on interactable objects when in dialogue
- Continued asset implementation
Art
- Cafe environment
- Ryan Sad
- Ryan Thoughtful
- Cat Happy
- Environment characters – classroom
- Line Art – Bar scene (MP Class)