Week 7
This week, the Patronus team completed the storyboards for all 4 scenes and updated the scene scripts according to the playtest feedback received the week prior from the main campus team. The main campus team used the scripts to add dialogue to the posted storyboards, which helped give their playtesters a more accurate view of what the final product will look like. Wenyu also began work on creating the threepanel structures for the intervention choice screens. He has completed the first iteration of the 4 intervention points using the previous storyboard pictures to show the possible choices the guest can choose. These pictures can then be integrated into the storyboards to help simulate the final product through the future playtesting even closer.
On Sunday, Cewon, Wenyu, Stephanie and Kirsten met with the drama students for three hours and took photo references for Incident 4. Cewon, Wenyu, and Stephanie got to the green screen room early to set up the lighting atmosphere and any needed props for the scene. Due to last minute schedule conflicts, one drama student was unable to attend and we had to adjust what we planned on shooting. It was still a productive session; we shot most of incident 4 with the actors that did attend and scheduled Sunday March 22nd to finish shooting the rest of the story.
On Monday, Kirsten and Stephanie had a productive script meeting with Talia Shea Levin. Talia is a senior in the school of drama and is currently enrolled in Chris Klug’s writing course. She had read the team’s very first iteration of the story scripts and had very insightful feedback. Some of her concerns were already changed based on the playtester feedback from the main campus team, and she seemed happy with changes that were made. Overall, Stephanie and Kirsten feel that Talia’s notes are extremely helpful and are looking at the scripts to do another iteration based on some of her feedback. The programmers were also able to get into contact with Brian Stuper, the server admin of CMU Campus Affairs. Stephanie, Mahar, and Ladera had a phone conversation with him about some of the logistics of hosting the eventual Morality Play application on the server. We learned that the PHP and MySQL that the programmers have been working with so far are compatible with the CMU server and that Brian could grant us access and space on their test servers to check that the behavior of our code runs as expected. Mahar and Ladera can continue to implement features, then zip the code and send it to Brian, who will upload the code onto the test server at a URL the team can access to confirm the application works as expected.
Next Week:
This newsletter covers both Week 7 and Week 8, as four out of the six members of Patronus will be attending the Game Developers Conference from Tuesday on. For the remainder of Week 8, only Kirsten and Ladera will remain in Pittsburgh to continue work on the project. Kirsten will continue to attend the main campus class, begin indepth work on the soundscapes for the application, and start putting together the team’s halves presentation. Ladera will work on implementing the wireframe and backend data collection. Following Week 8 will be CMU’s spring break. However, Patronus’s 1/2s presentations are on the Monday of the week immediately after spring break, so the team will be preparing their presentation during spring break itself. The next newsletter will be posted at the end of Week 9, after 1/2s have been concluded.