Team Objectives for This Week: Second drafts of scenes 1-4, rough drafts of scenes 5-12, next draft of panels for half of Scene 4 and concept drawings for scene 3 (Emily), brainstorm interactions for scene 1, rough VR drafts in Unity of scenes 2 and 4 plus ToC, recruit audio designer (Lillie).
The Search for a Sound Wizard... or as it turns out, Production Army
I wrote a recruitment email and put together this informal slide deck to communicate our current narrative and aesthetics for the project. With these materials, I reached out to 5 different potential teammates in CTD. I received positive interest from several people, and now intend to assemble a team of sound designers who can split up the work. Xavier Corr showed the strongest interest, and has offered to write + record original songs for the project & help us assemble diegetic soundscapes.
It also occurs to me that we could make a lot more progress by recruiting additional students to help us with our animation + code grunt work. I've already recruited one other CTD student who has offered to help us with either Unity or animation tasks, and I would love to find more. Clearly we need to balance time spent managing our team with the time benefit that having a team could provide. However, I'm very optimistic about bringing these people on, as all of them are excellent creative talents and I think they will elevate both our quality and our efficiency!
The Battle for Unity
Not a comment on our current political landscape... just my challenge to start "defeating" our Unity tasks for the semester.
I spent an entire day this weekend trying to set up a Unity project for Oculus development with the VRTK interactions library. After way too much downloading, updating, reloading, and debugging, I've decided that it would be a better starting point to use the simple interactables system written for the CTD Intro to VR class. David Lobser has offered to help implement one of my scenes as an example for the class, so of course I'm thrilled about that.
Writing and Interaction Brainstorming
Tons of progress on the script this week. We now have rough drafts for almost all scenes, and second drafts for several.
We'll organize our highlighting at some point...
We've settled on the desired look/feel style for Mira's journal entries: a combination of cursive writing appearing around the scene a la Dear Angelica, mini puzzles a la Florence, and silly sketches a la Night in the Woods.
I set aside some time to brainstorm interactions + sketches to accompany the script for Scene 1 that Emily polished last week. Two major ideas:
- Interactions shouldn't be complex or hard to figure out, they should all involve a single simple action or mechanic. Enjoyment should come from the simple interactions having funny or surprising results, not from deciphering a complex task.
- Sketches in these journal entries are a great way to foreshadow "random" story elements in future scenes, like an Ouija board or a collage showing up in Mira's very first journal entry. Not only does that add consistency, but it directly reinforces our story theme of the Law of Attraction.
