Demo Reel

Introduction

This week, we successfully delivered a demo featuring voice-to-voice interaction, including Athena and Poseidon’s personalities, as well as art assets of Athena to enrich the experience. On the design side, we also iterated through our concepts and established a new direction.

Progress

Art

We are continuing to implement Athena’s modeling.

Tech

The tech system can now adjust characters’ tones to create more natural conversations.

We also had a brief meeting with Charlie Agriogianis, an ETC alumnus and member of Chatbot-AI, a previous ETC project that faced similar technical challenges. From Charlie, we received many useful tips, including:

• Storing pre-responses in prompts so the AI can better mimic characters’ tones.
• Setting up a log system to record all dialogue during playtests.
• Implementing a context state machine once the user journey is defined.
• Using additional API calls to capture the player’s tone of voice.

Overall, the meeting with Charlie clarified many of our technical challenges. Moving forward, the tech team will continue developing the animation state machine, which will help players better understand context during playtests.

Design

On the design side, we consulted with Brenda Harger, ETC faculty, who pointed out that our experience was missing a hook—the element that grabs the audience’s attention and makes them care.

Originally, our idea was for players to take the role of a prophet interacting with Athena and Poseidon to decide the name of Athens. However, during an instructors’ meeting, we realized that we need actual feedback from players to understand what is truly entertaining, rather than making assumptions ourselves.

As a result, we prioritized conducting our first playtest. The feedback we received has already been valuable in shaping the experience.

What’s next

Next week, we will:

• Host our first official playtest day.
• Continue developing the dialogue system.
• Prepare art assets for the characters.