After playtest last week, we put more characters in background, more poses of characters in conversations, and small interactive features for fun. We’ve set up next playtest on next Wednesday. Now, we’re focusing on improving experience more intuitive and fun. For the next playtest, we’ll implement more characters which are from various ethnicity, improved UI for recording, and instruction for science reasoning.

This Wednesday, we playtested our experience with our target demographic. They were four 6-11 year old African American children. We’ve got feedback from playtesters about putting more details in background and making better indirect control to re-record and playback. For last two weeks, we’re going to focus on tweaking ramp experience, adding more characters in background, making more character gestures for dialogue, and making pauses between conversations.

This week, we’ve finished recording all voice overs in our project with Samantha. Actors and Actresses performed code-switching that is key point of our project very well. Hyunghwan edited all recordings to use and now is working on putting sound files on our scenes. Minjong and Megan polished art assets, such as character models, background, environment, and some cut scenes. Chitian and Kuang-Hsin improved programming part as well. Now, we’re moving to our almost last milestone. We’ll finish every work by next Monday because we have a playtest on next Wednesday with our target demographic. After getting data from the test, we’re going to polish more to prepare soft opening in Week 14.

We found voice actors who can code-switch between African American English and Mainstream American English. We have a plan to record their voice on next Wednesday and Thursday using our complete script. Since we finished our script, we have been able to work on finalized storyboard. For playtest on Saturday, we implemented temporary animation and voice overs using our own voices. This doesn’t have a feature of code-switching. But, we can test whole experience by this. Next week, our plan is making opening and ending animation and putting interactions on our application.

This Monday, we had half presentation in RPIS. We presented about our progress from quarters and further plans. Also, we came up with ideas for our intro and ending cutscenes. We’re working on making storyboard for that now. We’re going to get confirmation about it from our client on next Monday. Also, we’re on the process of seeking voice actors and we hope that we can finish all recordings in two weeks. Our next step is building character’s animation based on our story and putting assets for our modeling part.

After meeting with client, we changed script on our storyboard and start develop our beta version based on the storyboard. Beta version includes story building part, ramp task, and recording part with improved UI. Also, this week, we focused on making presentation slides for next Monday’s half presentation. We are planning to present updates after ¼ walkarounds, current status, and future plan. Megan and Kuang-Hsin have been to GDC this week.

On Tuesday morning, we did playtest with our target demographic in local school. We tested our Alpha version with three different groups;two boys, two girls, mixed gender. Playtest was done well as we planed before. We found several issues during the playtest. In an aspect of UI design, we found that our buttons are not easily visible and not intuitive. We’re going to improve UI design based on our observation. On the other hand, our art style was succeeded to present our story to children. Children could explain our concept pictures in the right direction that we designed. After spring break, our team will start to develop Beta version and prepare half presentation.

We’ve made our alpha version of product this week. Alpha version has features of a ramp task and recording and replay system. We’re going to test this version with our target demographic next Monday. Also, in play test, we’ll test our art and narrative design by giving our concept pictures to children. We will know that we have succeed if kids can make story without hesitation based on concept pictures that we’ll give to children. Also, we can measure our success by counting the number of sentences kids generated.

We scheduled our first playtest on next weekend(3/1). For preparing it, we met Jessica Hammers to get some advice to building our playtest design well. Based on her advice, we could design our measuring method for our testing. Our test has two goals. One is testing Art style and narrative design and the other is testing UI design for kids. Basically, we are going to use videotaping method to get data from the test. And, we have opened our website.

http://www.etc.cmu.edu/projects/blue-dreamers/

We prepared ¼ walkarounds presentation for a week and we did it on Friday. For this presentation, we prepared the first workable prototype of our user interface. While preparing this presentation, we think we approached our goal more closer and got clear view of our project. Feedback from faculty members is also helpful for us to make next step. For next week, we are going to fix our prototype for play test and design questionnaires for it.