Week 3: 1/26 – 1/30
This week Patronus made progress in further defining our deliverable. We continued our Tuesday/Thursday brain storming sessions on main campus and reached several critical decisions. After research and discussion, everyone was in agreement that the experience should be web based using HTML 5. While our programmers are less experienced in HTML 5 applications, our application will likely handle fairly straightforward interactions, so it should be reasonable to learn for the purposes of our project.
After several passes on the art style, our artists Wenyu and Cewon found the most efficient art style that the main campus class found appealing was a more realistic version using hard shades to stylize the characters. Samples of the style are shown below:
The artists agreed that Cewon will work on the characters while Wenyu will concentrate on the settings. Wenyu is continuing to work on the poster and half sheet design as well.
On Wednesday, Kirsten and Stephanie met with members of the main campus group to discuss the types of characters we want to represent as well as solidify the “teachable moments” that we want in the story. On Thursday we presented our ideas to the class and briefly discussed with everyone what the story group had envisioned. We briefly went through each moment to make sure they were in line with the learning objectives Andy had drafted. We left the class with a list of 9 possible “teachable moments” for Stephanie and Kirsten to further develope by next Tuesday.
On Friday, Patronus discussed what, other than the required items, we can feasibly have ready to show by quarters. On top of the required items, we hope to have a somewhat concrete storyboard to present to the faculty for critique and suggestions.
Finally, this week Stephanie sent out the project description to MaryCatherine to post on the ETC website, and Laxman put our weekly newsletters on the team website. Stephanie also sent out a communication to a game designer, Whitney Beltran, that Patronus’s faculty instructor Chris Klug introduced for more information about meaningful interactions we can use in our product.
Next Week:
For the upcoming week, Kirsten and Stephanie are going to meet with members of the main campus group to talk about the research for the teachable moments, and will have fleshed out story points to bring to class on Tuesday. Patronus wants to get the first pass of the storyboard completed by next week so that we can start defining guest interactions, i.e.: when will the guest interact with the graphic novel, how often will the interactions occur, and what type of interactions the guest will have (dialogue based, timed decision making using multiple choice options, etc). Cewon also wants to start to prototype a character in order to see how long it will take. Once a story has been laid out, Kirsten will begin to look at music and sound fx for the experience. Wenyu will continue to work on the poster and half sheets for quarters and Cewon will work on the team photo.