Week 13
This week, team Patronus interviewed their client Jess Klein as well as her colleague Lucas Christian for their promotional video. They covered topics such as why they liked our product and why they thought it was important to create, how college students are usually taught (or not taught) about how to treat romantic and sexual relationships and how their perception affects their actions, etc. We also captured video of them introducing themselves, explaining how complex an issue sexual assault can be, and how to contact them if any students wanted to talk, which we can place in Decisions that Matter after the main experience.
Other than that, the team was in high gear to finish the product for softs. The team worked hard to finish all the color and audio for the experience as well as implement the ending testimonials. Originally, the team had planned for the color to not be completely implemented for softs. However, we ended being ahead of schedule and completed all major color art assets on Saturday, in time for us to implement the full color version on the test server for softs. Kirsten and Mahar have worked together to create all the ambient noises and sound effects, then implement them in Flash in the background of the various scenes and locations in the graphic novel. Cewon also drew the intro images for all video testimonials, allowing Ladera to place them and the videos into the application in place of the placeholder ending images, while Stephanie filled in the dialogue before the videos. Stephanie also did general QA on Sunday, and the team grabbed some ETCers for informal playtests to see if they noticed anything out of place.
The main campus team also gave us some images for the landing page and content warning page to place before jumping straight into the application. Ladera was able to take the images and implement them in HTML5, putting them on the test server in time for softs.
Next Week:
Next Monday are soft openings for all projects at the ETC. We will be fielding faculty members throughout the day in our project room to go through our full project experience as is implemented thus far, from landing page to video testimonials. We hope to gain a lot of feedback from the ETC faculty going through the particulars of our story structure and our user interface. The products shown at softs are considered as if they are finished, shippable products, and are graded as such.
There are a number of things that we know won’t be finalized by softs, so we will continue working on them in the next two weeks. These are mostly in the introduction and ending framing the actual, graphic novel experience. We have taken the initial landing page and information entering page from the main campus team, but the written descriptions and layouts are only the first iterations. Now that Wenyu and Cewon have completed the bulk of their artistic work for the application itself, they can now look over and edit the way the introduction pages look and are presented. We also need to place the questionnaire at the end of the experience, as well as figure out how to present the credits and show Jess and Lucas speaking to the students of CMU.
The last major component of our product is the facilitator package. We will need to organize the information we are collecting per Andrew ID and hand it over to a discussion facilitator is a way that is easy to understand and organize to best help them give a useful facilitated discussion. Ladera has been in contact with a member of the main campus team, Sam Gao, to create a graphical layout of the choices taken by the students and their written responses for a facilitator. Otherwise, we will continue going through more playtests, and Ladera will also be contacting Brian Stuper to start shifting Decisions that Matter onto the CMU test servers, then onto the CMU production servers.