Week 11
Hi, all
This week, our team is preparing for the ETC playtest day on April 2nd. We are going to test kids’ preference on cartoon or photo realistic art, also we are aiming to create a complete experience including the new reward activity at the end for playtest.
Art
Our team is continuously making new art assets according to the script change last week including the main character Seal and its corresponding animation.
Besides, our team is also focusing on creating photo realistic assets for playtest. Here are the assets we are going to test for the playtest this Saturday.
As you can see we have two sets of art assets in cartoon and photo realistic style, hopefully we can figure out which kind of art is more preferred in the playtest.
Sound
This week our sound team is mainly working on the soundtrack of the experience. We have a clear vision of the soundtrack, which is something neutral and peaceful because the music should not interfere with children’s emotions.
During the research, we found a reference music that used space harp synthesizer as a foundation. Based on this piece, the team began to compose the music that yields a similar feeling. And on Friday, our team has finished a prototype version of the soundtrack that is about 2 min long.
After presenting the music to our instructor – John Dessler, who is a highly talented song writer and an expert in music composition, our team was advised to have a different option so that we can choose. So our team will work on getting different feel of music through another prototype.
In addition, we have put the newly recorded voice for our playtest script into the version.
Programming
For animation production pipeline, last week we worked on researching the After Effects to Unity plugin. The plugin is very useful to convert After Effects compositions into Unity Mechanisms. We were also using Adobe Character Animator to easily translate real world actions into puppet animations. However, a limitation in the export options of the character animator prevented us from efficiently translating the composition into Unity. Thus, we will be using the standard editing tools in After Effects to create the desired animation effects.
Apart from that we have finished integrating most the changes according to the script, we also did some polishing such as adding fading to the sand; having completed a tide effect; researching about keyboard input with the iPad (which turned out to be very easy to do, so we may be adding the feature to enable kids to input specific things).
We also completed one prototype of a reward activity, which is finding fish in a group of fishes. Implementing the group behavior of fish is a very interesting programming problem (usually referred as boid algorithms). We found some example codes on the internet and built this demo by changing them to better fit our problem.
Here is a sample video
Playtest
In order to fully prepare for the playtest, we created the surrogate questions for the ETC playtest day. Since we couldn’t use the original questions, we replaced them with others that were at a similar vocabulary level and asked a personal question to the child interacting with the app.
Next
For next, we are going to polish our app based on the feedback we receive from playtest and implement the 2nd reward activity prototype. Also, at that time, we should have a clear idea which art style we should go for.
