Summary of the Week
This week has been about refining our game and making sure we really hit the emotional moments with the sound and ending of our game. We finished the main features and worked on updating the ending to help guests understand how spotlights affect birds in real life.
Development
This week we finished all features in our games. And our programmers and artists worked together to merge and polish the main game scene. Targy continued working on tweaking the existing features. And Harry started to help artists to add art assets into the scene to make a more polished-like game.Harry made a tool for attractive lights, so that our artist would be able to easily change its model and their effect area.
Since we have our first version of our sound effects and BGMs, Harry put them into the scene and attached them to the player. A dynamic sound effect feature was also implemented in order to make players experience different emotions in different stages of the game.
Harry also added in the start and end scene. We decided that these two scenes should be simple, so the start scene only had our game concept image floating in front of the player camera, and the ending scene is more like a theater where the player stand in front of a huge screen which will play the ending video.
Art
For this week we iterated the bridge model. We reduced the amount of the columns between the bridge, so it will be easier for our player to fly through. We also added some decorative lights on the bridge to make it more visible in our scene.
Anlan also made the bird dying animation, which we will add to the ending of our game. After the playtest day, one of the most important feedback we got was that a lot of the players didn’t understand the meaning of the huge light beam at the end of our game, so we decided to add some animation of birds falling down from the flock to show that those birds are trapped by the light and are slowing losing their energy which cause them to die in the end.
We implemented the spotlight for the end scene because we want to build a “WOW” moment for the player. The idea was from an actual photo that shows a lot of birds trapped in the spotlight. We created our bird flocks and textured them by the color of sound birds. Then we simulate the animation path to make them rotate around the light. The final result looks fine and we are satisfied with it.
Game Ending
Since our guests had a hard time understanding the light beam at the end of our game, we started to brainstorm on what else we could do to convey the message that this is a real problem that birds face. We reached out to Mya Thompson at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and she connected us with her colleague, Andrew Farnsworth, who was able to provide us with real video footage of birds circling in the light beams which is shown below. We implemented this into our ending scene and we are going to playtest to see if this helps to get the message across.
Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy Playtest
This week we got a chance to meet up with Saul Wells and Hersh Merenstein from Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy. Saul is the creator of the E-Parks program that helps get people outside by hosting game nights at the parks and he helped us playtest our game at Schenley Plaza. It was really great to get his feedback on the game and we also learned that Hersh helped Diane, our SME, on her work with the dark sky ordinances in Pittsburgh. We spoke about wanting to share a template with our guests on how they can go about getting ordinances in their own communities passed for our actionable steps and he said he would help send us information we might be able to use. We are hoping to potentially playtest there again in the future and we are looking forward to attending the E-Parks events this summer.
What went well
We did a lot of refining this week in preparation for our playtest with Saul and Hersh. We added in the giant spotlight and the video at the end, changed up the bridge columns and added in the polished art assets. Overall we are feeling really good about where the game is right now.
Next Steps
We are meeting with a composer at the School of Music who has agreed to do a song for our game so we look forward to implementing that next week. We are also going to continue to refine our game but also look at possibly adding a short introduction at the beginning of the game that will help answer questions about the purpose and goals of the game. We also plan to work on what we want our actionable steps to be after our guests finish our experience at the festival.
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