Week 11 is a half week, with Thursday and Friday off for Carnival taking place on main campus. Despite this, a high volume of quality work was produced this week.
Design
Acknowledging the design feeback from week 10, the design team decided to make one more iteration of the player story to be more cohesive.
Moving out of the stomach, a holdover from before halves, the new player story took place in the lungs, and featured the manipulation of environment in order to reach the healing crystal. The forms of environment manipulation also took into consideration the storytelling of being inside of the organ, and was mechanically more cohesive with what the player already does in the space.
The design team incorporated the new player story into the pitch, and presented to Jesse Schell on Thursday. Mechanically, Jesse had no questions about the mechanics which was a major step forwards for the design team. However, the presentation of the player story left much to be desired. Jesse questioned a lot about the backstory of the world, something left vague up until this point. He reiterated that “If the world is real to you, it will be real to the audience”, emphasizing the need for thoughtfulness at this stage of preproduction. Finding the metaphors within our ideas would go a long way in helping our concept resonate. And that is the bottom line of the pitch – it needs to resonate with the audience more than anything else.
Art
In the half week, Joy continued to work hard on the character 3D model, modeling the final character details and finishing the rigging of the main model.
Harry meanwhile worked on concept art of the entire whale – something currently missing from the pitch.
With the updated character models and environment renderings, Yifan combined the character and environment 3D models in order to validate stylistic consistency. She also added UI elements that would help guide interaction with the space.
