Newsletter 11

Week 12: 4/6 – 4/10

On Sunday, we filmed the actors for Luke and Natalie giving their “good” and “bad” ending testimonials for the end of our experience. Kirsten worked to narrow down the takes to the ones we wanted to implement, then Ladera began working on editing the takes.

This week, Team Patronus also finished a completed prototype of the experience. Having a completed prototype has allowed the team to move one to a polishing phase of production, which we also began this week. Being able to see the experience as a whole allows us to get a better feel for the interest curve and the emotional high points. Defining these points let’s us work through the experience as a whole and look at where we need to have animations and more artistic transitions, something we began to do last week but are now more able to concentrate on.

Cewon has completed about 80% of the character coloring for the last incident and plans to have the entire scene colored by the weekend. Wenyu has the background for the last scene colored and has continued to work on UI art for the experience. Kirsten sat with Mahar on Friday and talked about sound implementation and her ideas for the sound design of the experience so that sound implementation can begin next week.

Kirsten and Stephanie have begun communicating with the main campus team, asking if they could help us out with creating what the pre and post experience will look like. They are working on the landing page and content warning, a new loading scene and the tool tips for the experience, the questionnaire, and the exit page. We should have all of these assets to us by early next week so that we can implement them into the experience for softs on 4/20.

On Friday, Dave Bossert from Disney met with the team and we walked him through our experience. He was impressed with the visual presentation of product, and expressed his approval for the experience, letting us know that making this kind of experience mandatory would be very important for new CMU students.

Next Week:

Next week, the team will be working hard to get a polished experience for softs. We will begin to implement and test the soundscape for the experience, as well as implement the colored characters and backgrounds as they get completed. Cewon will have the color for all of the characters done by next week, then Wenyu will switch out the colored images for the line drawings so that the programmers can implement the colored shots. Wenyu will also work on coloring the background for scenes one and two. After the coloring is done, Cewon will work on the art necessary to go with the ending testimonials. While the programmers wait for the art files, they will be working on the panel transitions, in-panel animations, getting the name recognition function implemented and lastly getting the ending testimonials into the experience.

The team will also work on the promotional video next week. We have interviews lined up with our client Jess Klein as well as an associate of hers, Lucas Christain. We are planning to film ourselves on Monday for the video as well. The team is also working on setting up playtests next week. Next Tuesday, the main campus team is working with us to set up a playtest during our class time. Cewon also reached out to a contact, and we will try to pool from our ETC classmates.

In short we are in full hustle mode to get as close to a completed experience by softs.