Summary

This week we started the implementation of our digital prototype by converting one of the three characters in the narrative into a Chatbot. We also completed the first draft of our Narrative Design Document with our story logline, general timeline and characters. On Friday we had our Quarters Walkaround and presented our progress to ETC Faculty.

Narrative Design

Our Narrative Designer has been focused on developing our Narrative Design Document. The first draft can be viewed below.

We developed a logline for our story and officially decided on an overall theme: Injustice – Injustice prevails when you take action without understanding the full truth.

Game Design & Programming

Our programming department has been working on turning the characters from our narrative into digital GPT-powered characters, as well as setting up a rough User Interface. Below is our current tech demo, with a sample conversation with AI-powered Hope, who is giving responses based on the context set up by our game designer. (Image on the Right)

Art

Art department has started working on the concept art of our three suspects: Hope, Elizabeth, and Adam. While the other two characters are still WIP, below is a concept art of Hope Alcott.

As part of our ETC Project Production Materials, we also started designing our project poster / half sheet.

Quarters Walkaround

We presented our project goal and current progress to all ETC Faculty on Friday. Below is our slide deck.

Below is all the feedback we received. We had lots of great insights on various aspects of our game and we plan to have a conversation next week to talk about these ideas and decide if we want to pivot our direction moving forward.

• On GPT-3
  • (Mo) Confused about how we are interfacing with GPT-3
  • (Ricardo) Can GPT understand the nuances of English?
  • (Tech Team) AI tends to make things up – how to utilize / avoid this?
  • (Tech Team) compare it with local trainable models?
  • (Mike) Compare it with hard-coded characters?
  • (Mike) Does AI know if a player lies?
  • (Jesse) Delay of response
    • Use filler words to give a natural rhythm
• On Emotional State
  • (Chris) Good characters hide their emotions
• On onboarding
  • (Chris) would love to ask intro-character questions
  • (Jonathan) does the intro-character have any bias / stand on the situation?
• On Sentiment Analysis
  • (Mo) it might overcomplicate the system
  • (Drew) give players emoji / tone wheel?
  • (Mike) caution! Sentiment Analysis works well with a block of text, not a single sentence
• On player
  • (Chris) How to coach the player to believe that witchcraft is real?
    • Why do players have motivation to find a witch?
  • (Jonathan) Does the player have a persona?
    • Preset character sheet, or create-your-own?
  • (Mike) Lazy typer? Does that affect the experience?
• On playtest
  • (John) need to figure out a way to get player’s real-time reaction
  • (Heather) Get a diversity of playtesters
• Other resources
  • (Jesse) Character.ai