This week was the second week of Inksmith’s second prototype, Animal Serenade. We’ve thus buckled down on producing in parallel as much as possible within the team. We’ve consciously as a team made an effort to move away from having each scene appear like a separate “page”, which means some alteration to the appearance of the scenes. To set up an overall idea within the team of how all the story’s scenes are structured, our producer, Stephanie, drew a continuous strip of all the scenes together. We had both a horizontal strip of all the scenes, and a circular wheel of all the scenes, as the main structure of the app is as a spinning planet revealing the different scenes.
Meanwhile, Inksmith been implementing the features of the prototype at a good clip. Our artists, Ariel and Hannah, have been developing one scene of the prototype first, to get a handle on what animations and art additions are needed for the rest of the scenes. Their first scene was one of Mama Duck swimming on the water, where the special indicator word is “swims”. Hannah developed the art and animation for the word itself, while Ariel created the animation of Mama Duck swimming on the water. They finished this scene by Wednesday, and have now completed both the cat and bluebird animations.
Our programmers Thomas and Rishit have been iterating the rotation of the world with the sun slider, fixing bugs, adjusting speed and curve, and adding a moon to the cycle. The static art of the scenes were also added into the build, with the audio for the narration and music lines cut up and implemented in each scene simply. We have also been working on implementing a sky gradient that will change color as the sun passes through the sky.
Next week:
As next week will be the last production week on Animal Serenade, our goal is to complete and put in all animations by Wednesday, then finish any remaining adjustments in the implementation by Thursday. This will hopefully allow us time to playtest our implementation on Friday and see what’s been successful in the features that we chose to present the story with. Inksmith will be meeting with a Kindermusik representative on Wednesday afternoon to show the progress and direction of the prototype.