Blog: Prepping for Quarters

Hello and welcome to our inaugural blog post. It may lack the glamour of seeing our beautiful faces in video form, but we hope to keep you further updated through more in-depth written content. This is co-producer Jared writing.

Before I say anything more, though, I should probably explain the basis of our project, as we see it right now. In our experience, the guest (player) will become Frankenstein’s monster, seeing through his eyes in the Oculus headset. They will go through several key moments from the original novel. These particular moments are meant to show how, through rejection, the creature turned from an innocent, newborn being into a cruel and vengeful monster.

As I write this, we are wrapping up a very full week of prototyping and making our ideas more concrete. On the narrative side, we’ve mapped out all of the planned story beats and put together a storyboard to show specifically how they’ll play out. From an art perspective, we’ve created concept art and some models of characters, locations, and mechanics. We’ve also decided on an art style to pursue.

On the programming side, we’ve been working to make the basic skeleton of our experience. To this end, we’ve laid out a few scenes in Unity. One is based on Victor Frankenstein’s lab, and highlights the sense of scale guests will feel as the monster. The other scene is equally crucial to the experience: A room with a mirror, which will be used to punctuate each of the scenes by giving the guest dialogue choices to contemplate what just happened. Incorporated into the prototype is a dialogue choice system we’ve been working on. The next step programming-wise that we hope to implement is a natural method of transition between these two scenes.

In the midst of all this, we also put together some comprehensive branding for our project. We now have a logo, poster, promotional half-sheet, and project description that give a stylized thematic impression of how we envision our project. Our Programmer and UI Designer, Yein, deserves a huge shout-out on this part for doing all of this 2D art in addition to prototyping on the programming front.

All of this effort will be put to good use next week, when we present it to the entire ETC faculty as part of Quarters. We’ve made it through one quarter of the semester, and so they want to see that we haven’t just been watching Frankenstein movies and eating Frankenberry cereal the whole time. With their feedback in tow, we’ll move on to playtesting and creating the meat of the experience.