Category: Month 3

This week, True North worked to implement new assets into our prototype, in anticipation for the ETC playtest day on 4/2/16.

At the start of the week, we held a planning meeting to decide the must have elements we wanted to include in the next big playtest of our experience.  Based on our own brainstorm session, as well on feedback from our instructors and the class, we wanted to make sure we included the following:

1. Story changes – made some story updates based on the last playtest results, e.g. the personal integrity moment swapped out a cell phone for a wallet.
2. Relationship decisions branching dialogs – right now we have a combined relationship meter, to get it implemented in the experience for the playtest
3. Redesigned endings
4. Sounds, including VO exclamations, replacing the timer
5. More BGM – ambients and environment noises
6. Feedback for choices made that affect relationship and integrity
7. Character animations – We requested the purchase of Spine software to help in this process
8. Remaining environments – Gym, professor’s office
9. Finished in-scene characters (clickable objects)
10. UI changes – font update, text formatting

By the time of the playtest, we were able to implement most of these changes.  There are still quite a few bugs that appeared when we integrated the range of assets this week, but we feel the project is moving in a direction that will boost the feeling of interaction and render the 2D experience more dynamic and visually interesting.

During the playtest, we saw 14 testers, most of which were in the range of our target demo (college aged).  We had about an equal gender split, with about half affiliated with CMU.  The majority of the playtesters felt that they enjoyed the experience, and they felt that the choices

they made were relevant to the story result.  On the character front, we had results that showed Ryan improving in likeability as well as “being my friend” from the last 2 playtests, which is encouraging.  We learned that the sound and bg noises helped ground the experience well, and building off our last playtest, all of the testers knew that the experience taught about academic integrity (or morality in some way), without specific prompting. Finally, the majority of our testers also reported that the experience was realistic and made them think about their own experience and history related to academic integrity (both questions ranked 12/14 as scoring either 4 or 5 out of 5).

For points to work on, we need to continue iterating on the ending, and making sure that the character journeys end in a more satisfying way.  In addition, cleaning up the dialog in the next few drafts to make sure that the players don’t experience undue confusion for the story (for example with the phone interactions and exposition at the start).

Moving forward, we will be implementing the details and polish of our game, which includes working on transitions, finalizing UI and adding more dimension to the animation (both character and background) on screen,  Story iteration will continue, in the remaining few weeks of the semester.

Below features a list of our work from the week.

Story / Design

• Draft 9
• Drafts of result screen
• Redesigned timed choices
• Testing what to show players when they make decisions that affect integrity or relationship decision

Programming

• Character animations pass 1
• Animations for choices, text boxes, speech bubbles
• Update story to draft 9
• Add relationships dialogue
• Add Voiceover
• Bug fixes…

Art

• Prepared Character art for animation (separating body parts, creating blink animations)
• Finished Gym and Prof’s Office Backgrounds
• Scene Characters for Restaurant

Sound

• Voiceover recording
• Character greeting SFX implemented

This week, True North conducted 2 playtests, received some unexpected deliverable updates from our client, and attended industry conferences – GDC & SXSW.

Playtests: (Data to be discussed next week)

We conducted 2 playtests between Monday and Tuesday.  Monday consisted mostly of main campus and ETC testing.  The MP class and our team came through to corral friends (undergrads and grads) into our room in the UC to playtest the current prototype.  We playtested 12 people, and have some new information to sift through.  On Tuesday we welcomed our clients Lucas and Joanna to playtest where we received…

New deliverable parameters!
While we received some positive feedback on our progress, we also got clarification on the news that our game must be tailored to undergraduates instead of graduates (we got word of this possibility over the break, but clarification this past week).  This changes the stakes quite a bit.  First, our story was targeting graduate students, and the characters and interactions reflect this (e.g. there are a couple of bar scenes, which will need to be changed to reflect the 18-22 yo market instead of late 20s crowd).  Second, the undergrad experience varies in a tremendous way – things that resonate with CS students might not resonate in the same way with Drama folks.  We’ve received word from Lucas that they are thinking of incorporating this tool to use as a reflective exercise with students who have been found in violation of the academic code.  So, not all freshmen during orientation.  That helps a bit in our alteration, but we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us to make this pivot.

GDC / SXSW:

The team took a hiatus from work (not good timing considering we have our Halves’ presentation this Wednesday!) to attend industry conferences SXSW and GDC.  We had a mini-True North reunion at a mobile games networking event (not pictured is Emily, who was hiding in Austin, TX).  There

were some great talks about the power of games to achieve different transformational goals, and we saw quite a few graphic 2-D interactive adventures / RPG persona style referenced as speaker projects.  Looks like “The Unwritten Code” (Our current working title) could be part of a web-based 2D narrative wave.

Below are some bullet points of what else we accomplished this week.  Next week we’ll go through our Halves’ presentation, our “pivot” to target undergrads and our playtest results.  See you next week.

• Prototype Playtests – 12 testers (including 4 additional on Tuesday – client playtesting)
• Halves’ Review – practice and deck creation (More on this next week!)
• SFX implemented, ambient BGM to be implemented, FX lookahead
• Friendship meter re-design (to make this consistent with the Integrity points system)

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)