Team PPJ, Fall Week 10

HAPPY THANKSGIVING from all of us here at Prediction Error! We’ve had a busy week of travel, rest, eating, and, yes, even a little bit of game development.

Most Notably, we have a first draft of a promo video! We had tons of fun planning and shooting this, and we’re looking forward to the finished product. Have a look below:

 

The programming team fixed a few bugs, tweaked some interactions, oh, and introduced the accusation mechanic. That’s right: you can now tell Madeline you think she murdered her ex-husband.

 

The art team is still cranking away at models and concepts.

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UI work included an iteration on in-world text.

In World Text

And we’re all back and ready to work hard through the end of the term (and the end of the year!)

Erin Truesdell, PPJ, Fall Week 10

 

Thanks, Turkey, and Twisty Cylinders

Tasks:

• Add “twist” functionality to piano cylinders: 4h
• Video Shoot: 2h
• Debugging, Build, Deliverables: 1h

Total Hours: 7h

Positives: Trains were taken. Snow was trekked through. Parades were watched. Side dishes were consumed. That’s right, it’s Thanksgiving Break! But that didn’t stop me (or my teammates) from tackling some small, high-value tasks over the past week. In my case, that meant spending some time at home in an Oculus headset, making sure the piano cylinders could be twisted together as we originally intended – the coding went relatively smoothly, and I’m really happy with how the interaction came out! It still needs a little juice, but the twist is there and that’s something I’m thankful for.

Oh, and we had fun shooting our promotional video – a parody of a scene from “Brooklyn Nine-Nine.” There’s nothing to cap off your last piece of work before break quite like Joe Brown wearing sparkly yellow suspenders.

Also, team communication has improved! This makes for a very happy co-lead 🙂

Negatives: FINALS ARE COMING. With concerts and assignments and presentations, my life is about to catch on fire again. The next few weeks will likely be a slog of problems and debugging as we crawl towards the end of term, but I’m confident that our hard work thus far this term has put us in a great place to stay on schedule.

Looking Ahead:

• JUICE for the piano cylinders: snapping and sound! These are important from an actual interaction standpoint, so they’re higher on the priority list than regular juice items.
• MENU! Or at least a draft of it.

 

Joseph Brown, PPJ, Week 10

Tasks:

Planned:

• Place Menus into Unity: 2h 90%
• Get UI Objects to Samara: 10m 100%
• Research Escape Room Design: 3h

Unplanned:

• Text shader: 1h. Hides text behind objects in space.

Total Hours: 6h

Positives: Read up on some interesting design ideas, as well as some reviews and memorable moments from escape room participants. I’m organizing the notes into a set of guidelines for puzzles in the future. GDC 2017: Lessons from Escape Rooms: Designing for the Real World and VR

Negatives: Not sure if Thanksgiving should be called a negative, but it took up a lot of time. Luckily, Erin kept that in mind.

Looking Ahead: 

• To be assigned

In World Text

Daniel Shalala, PPJ, Fall Week 10

Tasks:

• Countess Mask Modeling: 2h
• PPJ: 30m
• Team Film Shoot: 2h
• Team Meeting 1h 20m

Total Hours: 7h 50m

Positives: This week we recorded the video for the prototype of the team intro video. All things considered I think it went wonderfully. I also finished up the modeling of Madeline’s (as she is now known) face mask. It was a simple process but one that I took far too long to get to. Now that it is done I can focus on getting the head done and the chest done.

Negatives: It took way too long for me to get this done. With finals around the corner I have been struggling to get everything done. I need to buckle down and spend this week getting my other work and the work for SPROJ done.

Looking Ahead: Finish concept art for remaining two characters and work on the countess’ chest piece and head ornaments.

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Sydney Oswald, PPJ, Fall Week 10

Tasks:

• Edited Team Video: 8h

Total Hours: 8h

Positives: Even though it was a break, I got a decent amount of work done on our video draft. We were able to get together before break and film everything lightning fast, getting a feel for how the final product would work. While the opening is a bit rough (it is a draft) I’m pretty happy with the ending! I need to change out a few shots, but other than that it’s all color balancing and audio work!

Negatives: I didn’t have time to switch out the green screen in these videos for our prototype footage over break. I decided since it was a draft, the green screen would be okay for now.

Looking Ahead:

• Model Keypad
• Finish Video
• Gantt Chart