Month: November 2019

My second prototype was a first draft design sketch for my water screen set up. The purpose of my sketch was to put into perspective exactly what materials I needed to get started, what measurements I needed to cut down my wood to, and even prompted me to start looking into where exactly I had to go to get my materials. I added as many little excerpts as I could around each piece of my screen to provide as much detail as possible.

I emailed my sketch to a woodworking professional I met at my industry event who replied with a list of great feedback with suggestions about when I should be finishing the wood, what kind of paint will work best for me, what is too heavy to be mobile, etc.

I also shared my design with the class who suggested playing around with the idea of a sprinkler instead of a water pump and discussed possible methods I could try to apply to control water pressure on individual nozzles.

I took my sketch with me to Home Depot this past week and purchased my water utility tub as well as the wood I am using to build the container around it. I used the campus wood shop and worked with the student employee on duty to cut my wood down to the right sizes/angles.

Now that I have the box pieces cut up, my goal for this week is to put the box together and have the bottom of my screen built by my presentation at AIMM After Dark.

After reviewing the System Usability feedback, I developed a good idea on how to better this process.

The overall feedback was towards the format of the questions. They seemed one-sided to the desktop rather than about both desktop and mobile. Therefore, this is a better example that I need to make two different SUS’s focus on mobile and desktop.

Besides that, I also need to make the directions more clear to ensure people understand what is asked of them to obtain better results.

For the first prototype I showed off my in progress 3d model of one of my 4 characters for my game. The model is of me and right now i have the arms and legs all done and the body and shorts. I have some colors on them but not too much and not textures yet. The shoes were very detailed and seem to attract some people’s attention. But there is till a lot of work i have to do on the model so i have that to look forward to. I didn’t get much advise it was basically me just showing my model and people saying it looks good.

The other model i showed was an old model i showed used in a past project and it was a robotic eagle. So i put a cowboy hat on him and said that i would be making a robot cowboy model based round my old model design.

For my first prototype, I brought in my “prototype puppet” Linney, who I used as my first practice puppet to learn the basics of sewing and puppet materials. Since she won’t be in the show, I also presented a few reference images and sketches for my upcoming main characters – Freak and the Beast.

I was SO happy with the response to my first prototype. People really responded well to my explanation of the show’s themes and the characters. A few folks have already said things like, “Oh that’s me,” or “I was so The Beast in middle school,” and it made me so excited to see that people connected with the characters and the themes.

Here are the slides I presented along with Linney.

Here is some feedback I got for further development:

• Interest in behind-the-scenes content (good for showcase)
• Interest in how to make a character come to life
• The people love Linney! How could I incorporate her? Maybe a mockumentary style BTS extra where she’s the director?
• Think about the background of Freak and the Beast — where do they live? are they middle class? etc.

So the feedback on my first prototype was pretty constructive and very helpful as far as in terms of the story direction and content. The first participant in my project was Rachel, who suggested some good ideas as far as the ability of the main enemies of the story. I mentioned that one particular ability that this character has is the power to drain life from a person, she said that I could infuse the powers of heat and the drain to create one complex ability which to me is a great idea to improve some aspects in the story as it is still a work in progress.

Many other students saw my project and suggested changes to the overall structure, like one that includes the function to see stats on certain characters within a particular panel so that way people who read the story can get some extra background information on the characters and the setting. that could possibly work but incorporation in the scene will be the challenges, I will be able to do it and with more research, I can make it work.

So far this was all I got but it is helpful as it can be an opportunity to improve the overall basis of my project and help me with further direction and a sense of knowing what to do.

My first prototype was a demo I recorded and mixed. I will go over some of the feedback I received and how I am reacting to it.

• To much distortion on the vocals. They don’t sound human.
  • I need to consider how accessible I want the project to sound. Making the vocals sound more clear could make it sound better to a larger audience. I need to consider and balance how I want the project will sound with “pop” production. I don’t want this to be inaccessible to the average music listener. I lowered the made the vocals more clean in the newest mix.
• Make the vocal passages closer together to make the song more engaging.
  • I don’t think I’ll change the structure of this song, but this is a good thing to keep in mind as I continue writing songs.
• The drums sound distant.
  • Right now the drums are electronic, I will have a real drummer rerecord it next month. There is reverb on the drums which gives them a distant feel.
• There isn’t enough low end (bass).
  • I was not happy with the bass tone. I was having a lot of trouble getting it to sound right. I checked out some books about mixing from the library and tried different approaches to mixing the bass. I highly compressed the low end of the bass to reduce some of the problems I was having with it.

Test two will look at the arrangement of comic/manga tiles and how they are used to express what is happening within the contents of the pages. I will draft one page with multiple different tile arrangements to experiment with expression. As I research, I’m finding that tiles and story correlate more than I had previously thought.  

I’ve chosen to make two separate manga pages that use different techniques to convey the action and intent of the pages. With this prototype, I learned about crop marks for printing, screen tone usage, how to convey a certain mood with panel composition, and various other techniques. Also, importantly, I’m now more able to better gauge my time of how long it would take me to complete a designated amount of pages. By speaking with a manga teacher, hearing feedback from professionals, and examining works of professional manga artists, I was able to gain information about various techniques, and marketing information. My biggest personal take away was gauging my timeline and how long it would take to make to get this portion of my final project. It’s crucial for me to manage the ratio between the various project parts and the amount of each I will turn in. 

So far with starting out in Unity, I realized how much research I’ll have to do to really teach myself Unity. A good portion of it has been trying to figure out how to set up Unity to get the VR aspect of it running before even worrying about gameplay features or how it would look. I think I’ll be sticking to the Oculus Quest, even for testing, because otherwise I will constantly be switching back and forth in settings and there’s too much room for error that way. I’ll have to talk to Josh and/or Dr. Nakra about how often I can access the Oculus Quest when we get it or if I can have one in the meantime until I’m done. I’ve learned it will take me a lot of time to understand Unity and how to code the features I want to include. I’m definitely planning to start out with the basics.

At this point, I may switch between working on the story and programming, especially since I can get more done with the story and worry less about falling behind with coding when it will take more research for me to see much progress. I finally read more of the draft I have going of my script. Most of the story is worked out from after the relationship, but I really need to work on the beginning stages of it. I find it a bit difficult getting it to appeal to nearly everyone that it seems like such a happy relationship at first, depending on how much detail gets added, especially when it is based on a true story. I’m almost reconsidering the story being interactive at this point as well, but I’ll have to see how that will work as I develop the script further from its current draft. I’m planning to go back and find points where I can have the player make choices if I wish to go through with it fully.