Week 13

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

It is our thirteenth week of development, well really just a few days from that week as we are going on a small vacation. Not to worry though, we will be back in time for Softs so the ETC faculty can experience reading with our project and think fondly of us.

  1. Now for a recap of our progress for this very short week, just three days or so. We created the new tutorial video. This video teaches not only how to interact with the tablet, but also how to touch words to have them spoken aloud. It has been created and implemented in the experience.
  2. All bear animations are completed and in the experience! Though I believe the celebration animation needs some tweaking. There was something not quite right with the transition into the idle animation. That tweak has been completed, but not implemented in the experience.
  3. With the new animations in we have been working diligently to get away from the bear prompting with words and into the bear prompting through emotions. A small ding sound was added to assist in this. We have gone from prompting every time to prompting only the first time. Be believe kids will understand when to read after the first time. Though if they do not, we still have some reminders in place should enough time pass without interaction.
  4. Our reading levels were up and running at the end of last week and we noticed some problems that this caused in the flow of the story. We have since changed how reading levels work to try to make the flow less choppy. It should have fixed or mostly fixed the problem.
  5. Fireworks! Fireworks were created and a firework was modeled in preparation for our end of book celebration where fireworks shoot off and the player can shoot them off themselves!
  6. Lots of work went into passing words between the two screens. This was a somewhat controversial undertaking. There was some concern about taking the words off the TV. To solve this problem we are leaving a ghost image of the words on screen. In this the bright words will go to the tablet and there will still be muted words on the screen which will be legible. Then once read on the tablet the words will rise to the TV and be accompanied by a flash of white which unlocks the screen and continues the story.

That is most of what has been done. I know there are a few things I’m forgetting, but we can save those for this coming week’s post. In the mean time dream about what is to come. We are working on setting up a playtest, possibly our last. We are working on getting a reading expert we have been in contact with to come in and tell us what she thinks of our work and get some last minute feedback. For this coming week we will be making our trailer video which is part of our deliverable for the ETC. We will also begin working on our documentation.