Week 10:
On Sunday the 22nd, Team Patronus met with our live actors from CMU’s drama students shot photos of them for Incidents 1 and 2, as well as getting a few hanging shots from Incident 4. We were able to finish obtaining all of the photoshoot materials for all three primary scenes of our experience, which allowed us to quickly move into the lineart and composition phases for the rest of the week.
With the new photos, Kirsten and Stephanie were able to complete the pre-compositions for the entire experience, selecting photos from the photoshoot and using PowerPoint to arrange them all in the format of the panel with dialogue bubbles to simulate the panels in the final experience. With these pre-compositions all completed, Cewon could use them to move straight into drawing the lineart for the rest of the scenes. The team has decided, with agreement from the main campus, that the name of our product will be “Decisions that Matter: An Interactive Experience”.
Cewon completed all the lineart for Incident 4, sending the art down the pipeline to Wenyu for the environment compositions. She is well on her way to completing the lineart for Incident 2 as well. With the finished Incident 4 lineart, Wenyu was able to create all of the rough, uncolored components of the background and environment of all the shots, which he could then pass to Ladera to place in the programmatic scene. Once Ladera placed the shots in scene, Stephanie was able to code all the scene dialogue while Mahar implemented the interactive features of the dialogue and intervention branches. Through this pipeline, the team was able to complete a fully functional prototype for Incident 4 by Friday night, in time for playtesting the following day during the ETC’s organized Playtest Day.
While the programmers prepared the prototype for Playtest Day, Kirsten worked on building a questionnaire for our playtesters to answer before and after going through our experience. These questions focused on the guest’s ability to recognize themselves and their role in the experience, how compelling they found the story and interactivity, and how well the experience as a whole educated them about the options they can have as a bystander in real life situations of assault. We received feedback from 18 different testers throughout Saturday, though the majority of them were aged over 30, and thus out of our target demographic. We received primarily positive feedback from all our testers, though, with only minor questions and complaints over some of the UI aspects and how well they were taught.
Ladera was also able to meet Mike Christel regarding how best to go about playtesting as well as what kinds of data to collect in the backend of our experience to pass on to discussion facilitators at the end. Ladera also spoke with Bryan Maher, who told us that he would look into setting up a test server at the ETC to let us try using Shibboleth as a login for our experience. Ladera will hopefully be receiving notice from Bryan later this week about the status of the ETC test server.
Next Week:
Patronus’s goal by the end of Week 11 is to have Incident 2 fully functional in our playable prototype, from lineart to composition to shots to implemented dialogue, very much in the same way Incident 4 was completed last week. We also want to establish the kinds of transitions we want to use for our panels early on in the week, given that our current panel transitions are rough slide transitions from top to bottom, to start implementing them in the new scenes early on. On the art side, we want to have all our compositions for all the incidents completed by the end of this week, which will allow for the color version of our art to start being developed in the following week.
We have asked Spencer and Isabel, our actors for the main characters of our experience, to come in to the ETC again next Sunday to film the final videos that will come at the end of our experience, where they will come from their graphic novel form into real, live-action recountings of their feelings on the events of the story. We hope to hear about their availability in the next day or two.