Team Summary:
We all prepare for the final critical presentation with the VR students and develop our own slides. I and Marianna also complete all animations for the beach scenes and import them successfully into unity with few further issues but the slight mesh and aesthetic setbacks that do not directly affect gameplay.
Final Critical Presentation with VR students:
Collaborative Project – Final Crit Presentation – Google Slides
As it is the final week of the development of our project, we complied presentations with the virtual reality students for their final critical presentation in order to be given constructive feedback by their professors. During this process, I and Marianna complied some slides to contribute to the overall presentation in which we showcased and examined the different sections of our collaboration such as initial concept art and modelling, the character rigging, speech bubble interactive design and the animation process. This was a very useful process as we were able to compile all the work we had completed together as a team and present it to an audience that had knowledge of the areas of potential improvement. While this presentation was more centred around the VR students and their unity build, so we did not have the presentational space to go into massive depth about our work on the 3D animation side of the project, we were given the chance to summerise how our contribution was vital to the completion of the project and gave us a chance to critically reflect on every aspect of production.
Critical Reflection and Feedback from VR Lecturers
Initially stating how we were able to produce a 5-minute gameplay sequence in software over the course of only 10 weeks, I would argue we achieved a lot that was very useful and education in the field of 3D produced work. I feel our particular successes were in the overall design and story-driven elements due to our concentration on the narrative drive. I feel exploring the method of storying boarding within the 3D environment itself proved massively beneficial on a personal level to gain an understanding of exactly the realm in which we were immersing ourselves and our skillsets.
Reading from the work of Bucher, he brings to attention two questions when considering storytelling (Bucher, 2018):
Who is the audience?
What is one thing you want them to walk away with?
When critically reflecting on these questions in regards to our narrative experience there are two answers regarding what we have produced. The audience is intended for people over 15, but more specifically people who enjoy the narrative experience of a comic book. By creating the addition of swearing and comedic violence, it begs the question as to what age group this exactly falls into, but I feel the real audience is vaguer than a specific age. The game’s ability to draw older audiences into more classical childlike narratives begs the question of VR and animation’s potential as a storytelling medium for more than pure video game entertainment. The game’s purpose, in my opinion, when reflecting on what we achieved seems to serve predominantly learning procedures to teach us effectively collaboration across disciplines. In spite of this, I think it serves a grander purpose of pushing the exploration of non-gameplay heavy experiences that can be created in Virtual reality that embody and underline the importance of an experience in which there is no expectation or pressure placed on a player to do well to succeed.
In terms of collaboration, one of the primary pieces of feedback we received during this critical presentation was how well coordinated and communicated we were as a team in order to create the aspect we did. This I feel was particularly effective in our regular communications and meetings every week. I also on many occasions called teammates using Microsoft teams to continue to be effective in the workflow without having to be present in the same room.
An interesting comment which changed my perspective of our gameplay narratives was the use of speech bubbles seeming ineffective in their state, especially with the audio present. Going forward with these ideas of the project it seems imperative to make this more effectively design, and perhaps integrate elements of the bubbles following the player so they are always reading and facing the viewer.
Relevant tutorial to explore this:
(51) How to make any object looking at and facing towards the player in Unity – YouTube
The major point of reflection in regards to the entire gameplay sequence is the lack of progression we were able to make in regards to the last city scene. If the workflow was more researched and understood prior to starting the project, I feel this would have been achieved much faster as the primary issues that set us back were the Maya to unity conversions. In a reflective element though, the entire process was extremely beneficial educationally and inspires me to want to continue progressing in the field of games animation in future. Since I and the rest of the team mutually agree on combining our efforts to finish the project outside of graded assessment, I feel this will push us all to create a finalised finished piece that can be used as a strong showreel material.
References
Bucher, J (2017), Storytelling for Virtual Reality: Methods and Principles for Crafting Immersive Narratives, Taylor & Francis Group, Oxford. Available from: ProQuest Ebook Central. [7 Feb 2022].