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.