Week 5

Summary

Our Halves presentation is just two weeks away. We’re busy creating a playable prototype for the low-stake scenario (Coffee spot interaction) and adding more details to the game’s story. We’re also working on making characters look better by trying different facial expressions and improving the user interface to make it easier to read. Plus, we’ve started gathering sounds to make the game world more lively.

Narrative

We are currently integrating the narrative in the prototype. It is also being set up on twine so that it can be tested with a wider audience.

Story outline:

Art

We are exploring different types of facial expressions using eye + eyebrow movement on the character model. We tried adding a nose but it started to look more human than needed. 

Character model:

Character expression – Blink

Character expression – Mean Side Eye

UI

Programming

A modular dialogue system is of utmost importance and we have been working hard to make that a reality. Currently, we have a node-based dialogue system which is intuitive to the non-technical team members. We will keep identifying the strengths and weaknesses of this system based on our use case.

We have also hosted a gray-boxed version of the playable prototype. We will be updating it moving forward.

Graph-View based dialogue system:

Future plans

Moving forward we want to:

  1. Interview AP’s and understand what their expectations have been like in the past. This will give us more ideas to drive the game narrative forward to develop medium and high stake scenarios.
  2. Explore more facial expressions by adding a mouth to the 3D model.
  3. Integrate UI into the prototype.
  4. Start recording dialogues (Voice Over) and add them to the prototype.
  5. Prepare halves presentation slides and do practice runs.
  6. Organize more formal playtests.