(3.25-3.29)

Week Ten has been filled with playtesting as well as tremendous scene-construction with refreshing creations.

In the aspect of our artistic creation, our amazing artists had been contributing a great amount of effort in constructing the climax scene of Flow, the Celebration!

Please be our guests to have a glance at the Premiere Screening of the Celebration in Flow~

(Scene 5: deer, bridge with vines, temple, and waterfall)

(VFX design concept: Dancer Revival)

(Scene 6 Temple greyboxing)

(Scene 6 layout work-in-progress)

We’ve improved the precision of the hand tracking system through kinect in Cavern. Our programmer reworked the hand project algorithm, having the raycast from chest to each wrist to screen. The hand gameplay detection to discrete model was also remade to eliminate gradual shifting effects from the body tracking noise. 

After another round of implementation, we’ve an updated version of demonstration. This week Flow has been performed for several rounds of guests! We have the great opportunity to show a demo to guests from Cortina Productions. We were inspired by all the valuable feedback from the professional perspectives. One of the greatest improvements which would definitely help with the intuition of our interactions was to add some visual covering among the parts which we designed to be shown later. The visual focus point would be improved and the process of revealing each portion along the long screen in the Cavern could keep the level of curiosity.

On Friday, Flow was presented to two special guests who visited ETC with our faculty member. One of the key iterations we would like to implement is adding more positive feedback after each interaction both through sound and visuals.

(Host & Intro)

(Guests interacting with the magical clouds)

On the internal side, we’ve shown demonstrations to several faculty members who have been our great support as our consultants. We’ve received some valuable feedback which would definitely support and provide more perspectives into the experience:

• Tell the story and be clear about the deer’s mission. How do the guests know that the deer has to get to the temple to save the dancer? 
• The visuals and the movement are incredible!
• Love the idea of always keeping the hope along the storyline. Maybe the dancer did not pass away, generating the hope close to the end, giving the surprise of hopefulness. 
• Interaction: make the interaction of lighting up the fire more intuitive, figure out the motif behind the action.
  • Could add a candle and vines around the bridge for the guests to light up and burn.  
• Refine the host narration, taking the opportunity to provide the guests with as much information and instructions as possible in advance, so that the guests could enjoy the experience with enough background acknowledgement.
  • Empower the guests that they can interact with the world throughout the experience.
  • Sets up the overall tone, important! This is the time to teach, instruct, lead the guests into this world, and teach them the ways they could interact with the world. 
  • Design the way of performance that fits the overall style of the experience, have the host move in a graceful way, since one of the most important aspects of this project is grace. 
• Add camera movement, slowly zooming in the camera, providing a sense of immersion 
• Fully use the space, add some more elements into the world (flowers, lanterns, firework, etc.)
• Hand- tracking particles might be a bit too bright.
• Consider changing the color of the totem on the dancer whenever intractable (associated with the color of the porch/ orange & red?), so that whenever the dancer changes her state, the guests know that it’s time for the guests to interact. 
• At the end of scene 3, one of the guests did look beyond the end of the screen and tried to follow the dancer as she left, getting immersed in the world!
• Scene 2: wished the deer could have some interaction with the dancer, right now felt little connection, maybe the deer can turn its head toward the dancer and look at her.
• Title and credits really set the tone of the experience, take the time to set it up.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Plan for Next Week 

1. Scene 5 & 6 finish
2. Mocap refine
3. Prop lantern
4. Sound
   • Refine background music for scenes
   • Adding more SFX feedback
5. Prepare for April 6th (Saturday) ETC Playtest Day