Hi, all
This week, we aimed to have two sections of the experience (6 of our total 12 questions) complete enough to play through. We are slightly behind the schedule, but we are trying to catch up.
Design:
In design, we planned out in detail the underwater scene, which will be 2nd environment. We aim to ask all the trauma exposure and screening questions between the underwater and beach scenes. Instead of keeping the same sand character, we created a turtle who will act as a guide through the rest of the survey adventure underwater. In terms of interaction, we came up with different mechanics, such as poking jellyfish, dragging pearls, and going into warps or currents. We then drew storyboards for the entire app from start to finish. This has been very helpful for the programmers and artist so that they can visualize the design. We received feedback from the specialists regarding certain scenes and also had to move around certain mechanics and transitions based on the order of the questions. We will work on it next week.
We also worked on designing the different face animations that would be required by the character. We identified five basic emotions that the character would need for the dialogues:
- Normal / Idle (Smile)
- Happy
- Sad (speaking about sad topics, not sad himself)
- Surprised
- Excited
We will also be breaking down the required emotion for every scene and line once the storyboard is complete.
Next week, we will have the finalized version of the storyboard and script by Monday Feb 29.
Art:
More assets have been created for this week, but animation is still causing trouble. We were looking at very easy ways to bring our characters to life, such as Adobe Character Animator, but unfortunately we have not found a way to take what we make in a framework like that and bring it into Unity. We are getting help with this from our advisor, John, on Monday. We still think it is very important that the characters look polished, especially when speaking, because speaking comprises most of the experience. Children age 7-11 are used to smooth, finished apps, and we want ours to fit in with that expectation in terms of appearance.
Programming:
All the interaction mechanism presented in the storyboard has been implemented and integrated into our question framework, we exported the version and made a demo for the first environment. The interactions include poking, discovering and connecting things.
As mentioned in the last week, we had a performance issue with the discovering mechanism. So continue with last week’s work, we investigated online and found an open source fog removal effect inside Unity. So in the article, instead of using SetPixels and put all the work to the CPU, they used the Unity OpenGL library to directly draw quads on the screen. With renderToTexture and special shaders, the erasing effect can be done a lot more efficiently. We tried this method first on the iPad, and it’s running perfectly without the lagging problem last week. Then we rewrote parts of the codes to fit it better in our project.
With this effect, though, it’s now impossible to use special brushes that have textures. However, in this special case performance is now more important than good-looking. If we have more time at the end of the project cycle, we may work a little bit more to see if we can work around it.
Also since we want to animate all the facial features together, we also set up lip sync for the character in Unity. This will animate their mouth based on the line of dialogue being spoken. This feature will be used as a backup option in case we are unable to transfer After Effect animations into Unity.
http://i.giphy.com/6Lui8qlxar4t2.gif
Production:
We presented what we had in video form to Dr. Cohen and Dr. Mannarino. They gave us some valuable feedback – most notably, that our introduction contained content that could remind children of traumatic experiences! That wasn’t something we had considered and we immediately started rewriting that part. It’s always good to have someone outside the team look at your work.
What’s Next
Even though we are not as far as we’d like to be, next week is the last week before spring break, GDC, and 1/2s, so we are maintaining our goal to have the entire experience complete enough to play through for next Friday.
