Week 6 – Production and Testing

After receiving feedback from ETC faculty this week, we had a couple of serious discussions in which we discussed how we would shape our future workflows and pipelines going forward.

Now that our story is locked into place, we spent a day putting together an art style guide for each of the environments that we are developing. Since we don’t have a dedicated concept artist on the team, we collected references from all kinds of sources as a team, printed them out, and discussed the elements of each one that we wanted and didn’t want in our environments. With decisions being focused on how the environment could tell our story and hit the target emotions we want to create for our guests.

Art style guide

We are in the process of reworking the Land of Day to better match a deep sense of comfort and peace.

Early draft of the revised layout for the Land of Day

According to some of the feedback we received, we also started putting more detail into the Land of Night in order to create a more claustrophobic environment that generates a deeper sense of fear.

Screenshot of the Oculus environment in progress
Testing… while Euna was aware of the camera pointed at the back of her head.

On the character front, we’re diving further into Anubis and his visual development, while starting placeholder models for the creatures that will also be inhabiting these scenes. We’re doing a deeper dive into the visual development of the other characters in our story as well, by researching the ancient Egyptian concept of the spirit.

Current state of the character model in ZBrush
Low poly version of a snake for the Land of Night

As we move forward, we’re focused on identifying how to direct our guest’s attention around our experience by using various methods of indirect control. We’ll test these methods to see which ones are most effective for us, and start preparing for 1/2s presentations. See you next week!