Team Bonding Time!

We had great BBQ and delicious chinese food.

Week 3 Quarters

Production:
1/4

For the quarters, we prepared our game design ideas, but mostly, we are here to address our challenges. The biggest challenge for this project is that we only have limited time and programmers to do a lot of technical tasks. Implementing native hand detection in Unity is more complicated than we think, especially in linking it with a hand model. After some research, we found that there aren’t any pretrained object detection models specifically for ukulele out there, so we need to train it ourselves and also embed it into Unity. WebGL adds another complexity upon model inference for managing memory and dealing with performance, also we need to figure out the data collection with external configuration pipeline to be easily manageable for our clients. There are also other challenges including finding a subject matter expert for the team and we don’t have a sound designer. The team will need to address these challenges in order to build a product that we’re satisfied with.

Feedbacks we got:

• Augmenting visuals with audio? Ensuring the right sound infers that the fingers are in the correct position?
• Motion Capture? Not easily accessible.
• Find alternatives—three plans, different walkarounds
• Proving what is working—pros and cons.
• Is it worth describing the scenario at the bare minimum? How many hand shapes need to be trained?
• Get the Unity asset for hand tracking.

Game Design:

In a parallel production, we frame out the overall game flow: picking different song, instructing corresponding chords(left hand), strumming pattern(right hand) and finally combine into a song.

Our theming initial design: Octopus cooking sushi

UI/UX

Wireframing the left hand and right hand tutorial layout, ideally, the main concept is to capture real Ukulele, assign each finger tip a color within a number, and label on the ukulele to instruct where to point at. At the same time, the fret will be shown all the time as official reference.

2D Art

Updating team poster, half sheet and logo:
We haven’t finalized our game theme yet, so the poster design isn’t tied to any specific style. I’ve approached it with an Art Deco aesthetic, aiming for a vintage-inspired poster design. Since our project is music-related—specifically focusing on chords and the ukulele—I’ve also incorporated some musical notes into the poster.

For the logo, I’m considering using the Segno sign as the base (it’s also incorporated into the last “S” of our team name, Stringers, on the poster) to highlight the connection to music learning.