It’s week 14 and we had Softs on Monday. For anyone not familiar with the ETC we have a time late in the semester where the faculty come to each project experience whatever that team has been working on and give some feedback so the team might be able to get some last minute changes into the project. Softs went alright for our team. There were two big concerns:
- Voice recognition was not where the faculty wanted it to be.
- The voice acting, especially for Bearic was a little fast and they were concerned kids would not be able to follow it.
With this in mind we looked at our list of updates we needed, there were still quite a few things we had planned to do. We put these two concerns as high priority and got back to work. We recorded all new Bearic dialogue and added a ton of lines. Bearic now has varying levels of celebration depending on how well a line is read, more questions at the beginning, and Bearic speaks a little slower.
To address the voice recognition concern Mao and Mahar tirelessly dove into yet more voice recognition. Testing alternative methods and different APIs. We pretty much switched over to Google’s voice recognition. They also implemented a puppet version so we can simulate a perfect test experience for when the environment is too loud.
After softs we had our final playtest. It went very well. We used a combination of the puppet version and voice recognition in this playtest. We found that when voice recognition works the experience mostly works. We just needed some small changes to Bearic. These changes were already something we were working on though so it wasn’t too big of a problem.
Our next big milestone happens next week at the Building Virtual Worlds Festival where tons of people are invited to our building to see all the cool stuff that is being made here by first year students and in the project courses. We are working towards having the experience as done as possible by then. Now it is time for me to get back to work. Look forward to our possibly last post next week (maybe we will add a 16th post though on the last day of the semester).