Hello!

Hello friends! This week was fairly uneventful, but no less productive. We are making lots of progress on our experience.

Archive Storyline

We are working on a storyline in which you help an archivist find the recordings they need for their report and, when the recording they’re looking for is corrupted, record their own story to replace the missing file. Once the guest replies to the missing recording, the archivist will pause the recording and speak directly with the guest, asking follow up questions and trying to learn more about them. We are testing how to make the character on the other end of the line feel real and how to make their shift in perspective seem natural.

Client Meeting

The client is excited about the idea of using humor to disarm the guest, but concerned about the fictional nature of the storyline. He does think it is worth playtesting. He also wanted us to make our visuals more dreamlike and surreal. Rei and Angie have created a moodboard to try and represent the type of imagery we will be working towards. 

Technology

We are working on getting the telephones to do what we want. We are using an Arduino board for the hardware and working on getting button pressing functionality as well as audio input and output. Right now, our priority is getting the buttons to function properly, so that we can keep the buttons that already exist on the phone. 

Visuals

We have decided to start out with the normal office visuals and get more surreal and dream-like as the guest talks, before returning to a normal office at the end. These dream-like sequences will rotate throughout a variety of imagery to keep the guest engaged during the experience and will play as delve further into the story.

Rei has created concept art for several sequences:

Questions

Brenda gave us a social game called “Where Shall We Begin?” with lots of great questions. We played it last Friday and are using the prompts as inspiration to expand our list of questions. 

We will be playtesting this weekend to narrow down our list of questions by what the playtesters are more engaged in. We organized our list of questions in topics, so now when we give questions to guests, all questions will be under the same topic. The ones we have so far are: family, death, relationships, past, and present thoughts. 

In the experience, we currently will be asking guests two questions, the one from the missing recording and the follow-up from the character. We are also playing with the idea of giving three questions to see if it helps with the narrative flow and if it feels better for guests to answer three questions as opposed to two. There is also the idea of “ramp up” that we are trying to achieve, where the questions get deeper in a way that guests feel comfortable with.

Sound

Cora has started working on the sound effects for the experience and Thomas has voiced our current script so that we can put together a playtesting prototype.

Conclusion

We will be moving forward with the archivist storyline for the time being and seeing where testing takes us.

See y’all next week!