Summary

Our Halves presentation is set for Monday, October 9, 2023. We transitioned from a difficulty-based narrative to an episode-based scenario, each highlighting transformational moments. We improved the UI with states, a task system UI, and persona UI. We also made progress on facial expressions, specifically mouth movements. We conducted interviews with five autistic individuals from the SIGNA group, obtaining valuable insights for our project. We also conducted a playtest with members of the Playtest Included organization.

Interview

We conducted interviews with five autistic individuals from the SIGNA group, obtaining valuable insights for our project. Specifically about the following points:

• If and what accommodations do they need
• Their preferred ways of socializing with other people
• Challenges/Stressful situations they have faced in their workplace
• Effective Strategies that work for them to mitigate the stress
• If and under what circumstance do that feel comfortable to disclose their neurodivergence

We plan to conduct more interviews in the future to dig deeper into the same.

Narrative

We started focusing on the actual dialogues of Episode 1 of our narrative in Twine. We have also added the dialogues to the unity prototype.

Art

The Character model is being rigged. We also incorporated a mouth into the 3D model, and as part of our evaluation process, we engaged our playtesters in assessing its effectiveness by comparing their interpretations of the model’s expressions to real-life expressions.

Character expression – Uncomfortable

Character expression – Smile

Character expression – Sad

UI

We improved the UI with states, a task system UI, persona UI, Narrative box UI and the font. We specifically chose our font to be Gilroy as it is rounded and feels friendly.

UI Color Palette, Font, Button States and Narrative UI

Task Panel UI

Persona Panel UI

Programming

We identified certain issues with our current dialogue system, particularly its limitations in seamlessly incorporating events between dialogue lines. Additionally, the process of integrating dialogue from Google Docs into text format was proving to be time-consuming. As a result, we have transitioned to utilizing another open-source plugin, Yarn Spinner.

We have integrated our new 3D character model into the prototype, and we’ve also expanded upon the environmental details.

Playtest

We also conducted a playtest with members of the Playtest Included organization. They playtested our narrative on Twine, Unity Prototype and also gave us feedback on character 3D model expression.

Future plans

Moving forward we want to

1. Explore different techniques of character navigation in the scene. Keyboard WSAD seems challenging to the playtesters because of the Camera perspective.
2. Get feedback on Episode 1 and 2.
3. Playtest with APs and authenticate our choice of dialogues.
4. Integrate static character 3D model poses and expressions with dialogues
5. Start adding sound to our experience
6. Organize more formal playtests.