Following this week’s seminar, we participated in a group discussion with other team members and created a mind map discussing ideas of how to progress and develop our project with differing teams.
In these teams, we had to discuss a question that would make us critically reflect on our project and the way we approach it. Our team’s question was: If you were to remove one element from each of your projects completely, how would this affect the work?
For our project, we took several approaches to this question, thinking about software changes, narrative changes and character changes. FOr narrative, we discuss how without the use of comic bubbles, the project loses its comic adaptation in style and seems to take away from the intended experience. This was contradicted in our class, however, as someone suggested that perhaps adapting the games aesthetically to a cell-shaded style could retain the comic book feel without inherently needing the speech bubbles to adapt to this.
We also discussed how for software use, if we switched from using unity to an engine such as Unreal Engine, the processes and overall rendering would look very different and perhaps create an ease of relationship between Maya and unity due to its easier import and export options. We also discussed that perhaps one of the most significant changes would be changing the characters from anthropomorphic seagulls to humans, as it would take away the entire comedic value of our project and begs the question of writing the concept entirely due to how flat and mundane it would feel in a ‘human’ experience.
One of the major pieces of feedback we received from a classmate was perhaps thinking about how the entire experience, if not in VR, could be adapted in a way that still feels immersive. In this respect, they suggested perhaps making it a 360 experience using real screens and 360 sound space using speakers to immerse viewers in the world without the need for a headset, integrating the real and virtual realms in a more literal sense.