Project: Take Shape
Week Fourteen Newsletter
11-30-2012

Week Fourteen: Soft Opening

Returning from Thanksgiving break we fell right into our soft opening presentation schedule; a day full of faculty and staff visits to our project room. During these visits it was our turn to show off everything we have built thus far and all of the improvements from our previous showing at the halfway point. Considering we had a long list of changes we had plenty to talk about. Finishing up the presentations allowed us to focus on our next deadline; the BVW show after party. A time when the ETC would be filled with outside guests, industry professionals, family and friends, all of which would be viable opinion-givers on the overall quality of our project so we knew we had to impress. Minus the missing shape selector that was still waiting for the tetrahedron to be constructed we had every modifier functioning properly.

We received lots of great feedback from everyone that visited our project room which was truly thrilling and gave a great sense of gratification for all of the work we have put in this semester. Even some individuals from the Disney Imagineering department sat down with us for a while to talk about our project and laugh about the budget we were under compared to the budget they would conceivably conjure if they were to attempt the same feat. All in all we had close to one hundred visitors see and discuss our machine throughout the night with minimal criticisms on the project.

Once the party settled down and our team was able to refocus on completing the project we set up one final SCRUM sheet to layout all of the tasks that must be finished prior to our final presentation a mere nine days away. Lots of the work consists of polish for many of our assets. On the physical side we still needed to complete the cable management on the inside of the machine, seal all of the paneling for ease of cleaning, debug a few aspects of code and finish the final version of our user interface. Everyone knows what is at hand and, with no time to waste, we began our final push.

We will have a single play test next Tuesday, December 11th and then make any necessary tweaks prior to our final presentation Friday, December 14th. There will be a live stream for this presentation so we encourage anyone to watch live as we recap our process throughout the semester. Until next time!