Week 4: Collecting the Pieces

This week, the team’s main focus was finishing the character profiles for the first opponent, audience, and player character. With this information, the artist and sound designers were able to start building out the characters and music.

Meet Ace: The Player Character

Players get to play as Ace, a small-town country herding dog with a dream to make it big in the rap game. They’ve grown up watching Rhyme Riders on the web but have never been exposed to rap culture in their hometown. One day, they packed up and set out to begin their career. Having only the online impression of what a rapper is, they dress in trendy, off-brand clothes in an attempt to fit in.

Meet Fly Gull: The First Opponent

Fly Gull is a young rapper/producer from the Bay who has risen to fame because of her sister a popular music producer. As the product of nepotism, she’s always had an easy, rich life. Fly Gull is super chill, laid back, and loves to vibe. Her fans, the Sunbeams share Fly Gull’s mellow attitude and are supporting her in her race to win the RHhyme Rider Competition.

Fly Gull raps in a G-Funk style, taking inspiration from Warren G, Snoop Dogg, DJ Quik, Egghead from Disco Elysium, and Lil Mariko (check out the sample track below). She is bad at flying, is on a diet misses greasy food, and doesn’t understand how her nepotism has benefitted her.

Talking to Fly Gull

The reason we are building out a character profile is so that ChatGPT can take on that persona and predict what a character like this would say/reply. he opponent needs to have a chat mode and battle mode. Here’s some sample dialogue using the profile we built out so far for the chat mode.

As we move throughout the project, we will adjust the character profile information to make a more distinct character.

User Flow

The AI backend is almost ready to connect to frontend programming, but what does the interface look like? We spent some time this week developing a User Flow using Figma to highlight what needs to be on the screen when it needs to be there, and what comes next.

Next Steps:

Week 5 will be us putting all the pieces together as we start to connect the experience. We will also be doing our process grades and hopefully starting to plan a playtest.