Hello,

Week 11 was very exciting for us, and very straightforward to speak about.  Our primary goal for the week was to get to a playtestable state, with our new AI system driving the agent.  We came very close to this goal, getting our behaviour tree tool working, and building a working tree for Mixy to use.  More details on that later.  We also continued to make animations, we got a lot of voice

over work done, with a robotic tone included.  

Before we get into the details of the AI system, let’s talk about our progress artistically.  We are continuing to work on specific supplemental animations.  An example is when the agent feels musically inclined, they may produce a banjo and serenade the guest.  We anticipate that many animations will have to be iterated on after playtesting as well, and look forward to improving the experience by doing so.  Voice over work is going very well too, as we have found a method to master the audio to sound very robotic.  This will also be continually iterated on for the remainder of the semester as needed.

Okay let’s get into the AI system.  Our behaviour tree system’s first pass was finished last week, but that was just a base layer.  There were a few bugs to work out, and it wasn’t quite ready for design to use extensively.  Over the course of this week, we have continued to improve on it, and managed to make it usable by design.  Initially, our goal was to have a playtest on Friday, but we barely missed being able to get everything ready by that day.  Unfortunately, our our behaviour control code is still in place, and needs to be turned off, as well as some finishing touches on the animation system, and allowing it to work with the behaviour tree nodes.  However, because the tool is usable, if not 100% functional yet, we did manage to build out all the AI logic, which works, so once the final pieces fall into place we will be good to go.  Our best timeline for this is Monday, or Tuesday morning at the latest.

Overall, this week went very well, and we got a lot done.  However, technical challenges still put us behind where we expected to be.  This is software development though, so we of course were ready for the possibility and prepared to keep moving forward at full speed.  

Can’t wait to tell you more about our progress next week,

~mixAR