Month: April 2023

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.