Category: Month 4

This week, True North implemented final touches on the prototype in anticipation for ETC Showcase as well as the final touches related to our production.  We have some remaining details to hammer out, but overall we have hit the major milestones and feel confident in our ability to wrap things up before our finals presentation this coming Monday, and main campus showcase on Tuesday.  This week we also submitted our promotional materials to the archive, as well as our preliminary production documentation.  After our presentation next week, we will be revisiting the promo videos to add some nicer titles, but they are available currently at the end of this post (as well as on the Media tab).

ETC Showcase:
We had a productive showcase, talking with folks from a variety of backgrounds (ranging from educational, to multimedia and interactive narrative backgrounds).  Most expressed positively to A Fine Line, and felt that the art and the interactions worked well.  Our clients took time out of their evening to stop by, and complimented us on the project, and our progress since we had last showed them the game.

Technology Transition:
This week, Hilman and Tim met with representatives on main campus to discuss the needs and process for transferring the game to the university server.  The University has learned from their experience transferring over Decisions that Matter, and we anticipate having to make adjustments before we can fully grant them access and ownership.  We are in communication with the CMU IT team, and have begun the process this week.

Moving ahead, we are preparing for our final presentation for Monday, the main campus showcase, and wrapping up project production.

This week, we had our Soft Opening, a playtest and capped off our week with a client meeting during the morality play class.  We have one more week to go before our final presentation, and this week we’ll be making some final changes and wrapping things up before we hand over the project to our client.

Our softs feedback pushed us to take care of the remaining technical touches to the deliverable, and focus on polish.  For the content, they also pushed us to think about ways to make the story and decision moments more nuanced for the player.  In a follow up meeting with our instructors, we decided to implement some of these changes through dialog.  And, we need to make clear during our final presentation that the deliverable needs to be clear on academic policy, expectations and consequences for violations.

This week, we met with our clients and they expressed positive feedback on the prototype.  They suggested some minor changes, and all that remains for us to complete is adding the “results” screens to the end of the experience, and lock in our loading and introduction at the start.  We’ve begun conversations with the CMU technical support to transfer over our server before the end of the term as well.

Looking ahead, we’ll be preparing for:

1. Making the final changes to our deliverable
2. ETC Showcase day (this coming Wednesday)
3. Preparing for the final presentation next Monday
4. Assisting the Morality Play class as they present the project on CMU’s main campus showcase