Author: Sandra Liu

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.

After receiving 1/4’s feedback from faculty members, we came up with three new approaches to present to our client; not all of the ideas directly tackle the issue of gender inclusiveness and diversity, but we believe that that issue can be solved naturally by focusing on other aspects of character creators:

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Client Meeting

EA picked #2, which was based on an internal vote. Here are some key reasoning points for their decision:

1. It would be interesting to see how the team can present different body types through UI/UX
2. Easier to achieve in terms of uniqueness due to it being a less familiar approach compared to the other two
3. Any game genre can adapt to this approach
4. Approach #1 and #3 have some nuance and are narrower than #2
5. #1 was actually considered as the most difficult approach

1/4’s

Below are some samples of the three-idea brainstorms for approach to character creators. We decided that the best way to narrow down our approach, is to have approaches that cover the three big areas of game development: art, design, and technical. Due to our team only being six people, we realized that our scope would be too big if we were to involve all three or even two of these areas.

We presented these three approaches during our 1/4’s to observe which one that the faculty were most drawn to.

First, based on questions from last week, we decided to have each team member brainstorm three ideas on interesting approaches to character customization.

Next, we landed on Tabula Rasa as our team name. It is Latin for “blank slate” which matches with our character creator revolving around freedom of self-expression and identity. Also, Justin started on the team logo design! Below are some high-level options:

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Client Meeting

We were given many specific technical constraints regarding how EA develops, updates, and manages assets on their development side. But the most important take away from the meeting was that our target demographic was everyone due to the average age of gamers increasing overtime.