Tabula Rasa

This week is the last week before our final presentations, so the team worked on finalizing the demo build, along with design and art documentations that will be delivered to our client.

Final Demo

The focus of our prototype was to showcase a technical and design approach and how it could be presented to the users. First we start with the adjective system where the users pick the attitude of the character, rather than binary choices such as male or female. The pose links the character’s attitude with the body and shows how it can influence the character. Next, we move to body customization where users can pick a body type and adjust the range of that body type along with gender expression. From there we revisit adjectives but this time through the lens of style and fashion where users can select up to three secondary adjectives for the character’s style. In the last section, the user dresses the character with clothing based on the secondary adjectives that they picked. We wanted a lot of flexibility in our prototype so we allow the user to go back and forth to any step of the character creation process at any point in time.

Reflection

We had successes and failures within this project. As far as failures,

• Overall, the prototype was not as in depth as we initially aimed for.
• While research for this project was needed and is great for our documentation, we spent too much time researching and discussing approaches when we should have jumped into playing with prototypes sooner.
• The technical issues were a big challenge and took a significant amount of our time, which led to less focus and polish on our design.

However, because this was exploratory and the deliverable includes not just a prototype but also the documentation of our process, figuring out the challenges of this technically and what works and what doesn’t is a success as developers can use this information going forward. On a final note, our client and play-testers expressed enjoyment from the adjective system that we created and the new approach to character customization.

We incorporated the feedback we got from Softs into our prototype by focusing more on the order of the steps to provide a more guided experience for users instead of having multiple steps on one screen, since some faculty seemed to miss parts of the experience when they were playtesting. Having the adjectives appear on a separate step also allows the user to really focus on what those mean for the character rather than rushing past them/through them to do the other parts of a character creator they already are familiar with. 

New UI Layouts

We also thought that we could try to make the experience flow more intuitive by using icons and tabs.

Rough Mockup With Visuals

Meanwhile, the tech team and art team continued to work together to finish all the models, textures, animations, and weight painting for the body types and outfits.

This week, we analyzed the playtest day feedback in more depth and tried to merge it with our advisors’ suggestions to make changes to the build and prepare for Softs next week, where faculty members and ETC alumni will give us more feedback.

We altered the order of what is presented to the player. We wanted to tie the personality into building the body more, so we combined picking the first adjective (along with the pose) with the body type adjustment screen. We also got feedback about players wanting to adjust in between the body types more, so we have been working on adding a slider for each option that will allow for adjustments within that types range. Players also mentioned feeling like the lack of context about the secondary adjectives left them confused, so we’ve added instructional text to connect the adjectives with the clothing and how that is related to an individual’s personality. 

Outfit Concepts

These are the finished clothing designs; they have been modeled and are currently being rigged and implemented into the revised prototype.

Our next milestone was to compile the playtest day feedback to refine the UI/UX, implement some changes to functionalities for the body type adjustment screen, and troubleshoot technical problems for outfit mesh clipping, all based on the feedback. The main goals for playtest day were to observe the guests’ reactions to the adjective system as well as any confusions present in the experience flow. Playtest day was very helpful because we had a mix of both gamers and non-gamers and we received a wide variety of perspectives.

We also decided to remove any hints of genre or theme because it took focus away from what we were attempting to highlight in our character creator. (Previously, the character creator’s environment was a theatre stage). We took inspiration from Nintendo’s Mii creator, which does not have any theme, and created a mockup that mimicked the visuals of that.

Outfit Concepts

Client Meeting

We got more feedback regarding our experience flow.

This week was spent creating specific UI mockups and UI changes. To prepare for playtest day, we implemented basic body-type change adjustment functionalities, some basic functional UI elements, along with an early outfit picking screen.

Client Meeting

We met with members of EA’s Skate team, and discussed our adjective system, and some technical restraints that the Skate team has run into with how they are doing character creation, which gave us more insight on the potential roadblocks we may face down the road. The Skate team also mentioned that what we were trying to accomplish is challenging and that we were doing an impressive job, giving us momentum. Other than that, our client wanted us to keep up what we were doing.

This week, we continued the implementation of the UI layout and functionality, created athletic clothing designs and models of clothing, character poses and their animations. We also started encountering technical issues where the clothing and character were clipping for some clothing options. Fortunately, we were able to put together a reasonable work pipeline to tackle the issues.

Finally, we began to plan for playtest day. The plan was to have a 5-minute-maximum character creator experience.

Client Meeting

We received positive feedback from the client regarding our progress and direction so our next step was to keep production going. Also, an external team at EA wanted to meet with us to ask some questions about our thoughts and reasoning behind our approach to the character creator.

We came back from a week off for Spring Break and aimed to continue work on making the digital prototype along with the feedback we received from our 1/2’s presentation. Up until now, we had only conducted playtesting with a paper prototype, but decided we needed to move into the digital phase so we could start getting feedback on the adjective selection system and the visual feedback the players would receive along with that.

We also got assigned our faculty consultant, Ricardo Washington, so we scheduled a meeting with him to get his thoughts and feedback about our direction and what we have. We got some great advice from him that helped us think about how we present the order of the creation process to the players and also some other creation references.

We worked on implementing the functionality of the UI we had come up with the week before Spring Break as well as made some changes to some of the adjectives. We originally had “calm” as one option, but after beginning the designs for the character poses related to the adjectives, we realized that “calm” and “relaxed” would be difficult for users to differentiate. So, we made the switch from “calm” to “elegant”.

Additionally, we previously met with a technical artist who worked on Dragon Age in one of our client meetings, who gave us some feedback about pushing our body type models we had even further in regards to the skinny and large types. We took her advice and altered those further, creating a slightly more extreme range for the body types. When we showcased our updates to the client they also brought a rigger, Charles Looker, who is currently working on a project that deals with character creation at EA to talk with us and possibly help us with any technical or rigging questions we may have. He was excited and impressed with the work we had done up until this point, and interested in the direction we were using to approach character creation. He was able to talk through some questions we had which was really helpful. That wrapped up our week, and we started thinking ahead to our plan for the next couple of weeks in preparation for Playtest Day on 4/1.

This week was spent preparing for our 1/2’s Presentation (Our presentation is third in order)

1/2’s Presentation Feedback

The general feedback for our direction from our 1/2’s presentation was that the method of using adjective words for the character being created was an interesting approach with potential for expansion. However, it seems that we still needed to have a much clearer picture of the specifics for the user flow and how the user will perceive our approach to body type and outfit options. Additionally we needed to clarify how we are going to present our final ideas to our client.

The 3D artists focused on creating the actual models for the character creator’s base body types in ZBrush and Maya. We decided that it would be best for the user to work with a unisex character without facial expressions, fingers, and toes. The character would be like a blank mannequin with focus on inclusiveness through body types.

Early Tech Demo – Morph Target System in Unreal Engine 5

Client Meeting

The two take-aways from our client meeting this week were:

• Try to explore more extreme body types such as overweight and skinny.
• Do not worry about performance/optimization of our demo, since the topic is more about presenting our ideas and approaches rather than attempting to create a perfectly working character creator.

This week, conducted a paper prototype playtest by preparing paper prints of different body types and various outfits. All the paper pieces were organized and laid out on the table so that the playtesters were free to combine different body parts then add the outfit options.

UI/UX

We realized that a character is not only defined by their visuals but also their personality, which is why we came up with adjective words that the players can select for their character before editing the appearance. As we decided what words to use, we also came up with a list of words to avoid, since those could potentially adhere to stereotypes.

Adjectives to Use	Adjectives to Avoid
Sporty, Studious, Bold, Reserved	Funny, Strong, Anxious, Hungry