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.