Day 50: Uh-Oh!

Our SVN, the system we're using to share files with each other (Basically Dropbox but different), has stopped working. It won't add or receive files. This is a big hang up as it means we can't show you any of the work we made today (The person typing this is at home and can't access the new files made today). Hopefully this will be resolved quickly! Its not the end of the world but it is a pain in the butt. :(

Day 49: The Final Piece of the Puzzle

After much headache and a few days of work, the final puzzle in Storkinators has been designed! Its being kept purposefully vague in this picture because we don't want to spoil it for you. ;)

The scripts has also been typed up. Usually there are small tweaks all the way up to it being recorded so it isn't "finished" per-say, but we're going to go ahead and say its finished. Yes! Hi-five, internet!

Day 48: It's-a-me!

Charles Martinet (the voice actor for Nintendo's Mario) came to our college and gave a lecture today. He also gave us at Storkinators this fabulous message:

Day 47: A-Maze-ing

We began work on a scene set in Egypt in which the composers must escape from a dungeon inhabited by a monster.

How will our heroes get out of this one? D:

Day 46: Art Art Art Art

Not too many developments at the moment. We worked on implementing our assets into the game and talked a bit about our planning. The demo is taking longer than expected to get online because we want to make sure everything is polished and as perfect as we can muster. Also, our protagonists' voice actor Erik is going to come visit the office on Wednesday and check out our digs. We'll inevitably post pictures that day.

MORE ART YEAH. We're working through Egypt as quickly as possible because there are some pretty tricky scenes coming up.

Day 45: Business as Usual...

Fridays are always the laziest days for blogs, sorry about that. We're just always pooped by the end of the week...

We thought a bit more about how to apply our feedback. We've added an interactive element between chapters and are thinking about adding some other possible things we can do to spice up the game.

Also, art.

The past three weeks have just flown by. We're getting closer and closer to our deadline and there's still so much we want to include in the game. Bach's expression just sums up how we feel about that:

It'll get done, not too much worry about that. We just want everyone to love our game-baby as much as we do!

Day 44: Playtesting Results & Egypt Art

We went over the play-test results with our team and project coordinator today. In general, the game was well received, so that's a relief! We still have to write a full report but here are the general points and possible additions (translated from Dutch notes):

- More (inter) action: things you can tap/interact with while listening to the story.

- More motion: things that move give the game more life. 

- More clarity as to when you can tap something: Better glow? Enlarge interactive objects? 

- Pause during the waterfall scene breaks the flow: fix the audio for the game flow’s sake. 

- Tapping is more natural than swiping: we need a tutorial at the beginning & introduction of the characters.

- In the jungle maze people want to be able to tap the objects they find: for example a glow around an object can help. Make it clear that you can do something with the object. 

- At the building the raft scene: Not clear that the objects have to be moved from one square than the other. Testers drag objects to the center and don’t experiment with different boat types. 

- More Illustrations 

- More tasks and puzzles 

- Was unclear which character is which at the start 

- Subtitles where suggested, make them an option?

The kids left some fan art for us behind on the white board! :D

Today we also cracked on with the art for the Egypt scene. Here are some examples:

Day 43: Playtesting Today

As mentioned yesterday, we don't have much to report today because the team is separated. Tomorrow we'll meet at the office and talk about the playtest.

A notable development though is that we tried out the game on a phone and it runs just fine. We were worried there would be a lot of tweaking involved but it runs the same as if it were on a tablet. Yeah!

Day 42: Egypt Art

Tomorrow we're finally play-testing. Chances are there probably won't be a blog entry because we'll be all split up. We'll try to post something though.

We're more or less prepared, kind of a late day at the office getting everything done last-minute exactly the way you're not supposed to. ;P

As promised, here's our cover art for the game:

Also, some additional illustrations worked on today. Both are works in progress.

Day 41: Prep & Art for Egypt

All the last-minute additions to the play test version of the game are under way. We also have to finish our promotional art by tomorrow morning. We decided to do another piece more in the style of the game which isn't done as of when this was typed, we'll post it tomorrow.

We're continuing with the illustrations and designs for the next chapter set in Egypt. Here's another character: the Goddess Hathor in her cow form.

Some sketches and other approaches figuring out her final design:

Day 40: Prep for Playtest

We're working hard to get the Stokinators demo completely done and polished so we're prepared for our play test on Wednesday. The plan to to also upload the demo online so the world can play it. Yes, you can finally try out our game soon! It will probably be online later this week if everything works out. The plan is to allow players can send us comments and feedback as well to assist us with our college research documentation.

The biggest workload at the moment is animating the scenes in the demo. This involves breaking up each image into layers in Photoshop, then bringing the layers into Unity. From there we can move everything independently and add particle effects.

We're also adding an extra illustration for better pacing into the Demo. 

On top of getting the demo finished, we have to give our college promotional material before Tuesday that they can print for the graduation exposition. Its almost done but here's a work in progress:

We've been hard at work and ready to enjoy the hell out of a relaxing weekend... :P

Day 39: Minor Character Designs

Here's a couple of minor character designs that were worked on today for the second chapter. We tweaked the shop keeper quite a bit to make her more interesting visually and worked on some additional characters.

Day 38: Cheap Labor & 1000 views!

Our writer Molly was at home today finishing up the script today so we brought in a cheaper replacement.

In other news, our blog reached 1000 views today! Thanks everyone, we love you! <3

Day 37: Playtesting

Hello fellow Followers,

Today we can give you some news about organising the play-test. Today we managed to get permission to test our first prototype. The Game will be tested whit kids at the European School Bergen (NH). We are very pleased that we got this permission.

The play-test will show us, how understandable the story is for kids and adults. We want to test which way the tendency goes. Hopefully we will get interesting outcomes.

We will keep you up to date,

cheers

Day 36: Script is Nearly Finished

Not too much to update today. We may be able to play test on Wednesday at a school and the script is neaaaarly finished. :D Another day or two of writing and we should have something that more or less resembles the final script you will hear in the game.

We also settled on design for one of the characters recently. She's pretty minor but we thought we'd share her with you.

Day 35: Plans & Playtesting

Today we all had a meeting about our midyear feedback and how we are going to go about play testing. We want to test the game with kids and adults and see what the two age groups think of the game. From this we can figure out if our game is more for kids, adults or has a bit of both. We'll then have a better sense of perspective on Storkiantors.

We're going to start play testing next week and are looking for children and parents to test the game. We've started contacting our old high schools and other malicious people who fit these audiences and can test the game. In the meantime we're getting the assets for chapter 3 ready for implementation next week.

Day 34: Lets Play a Game!

Can you spot Bach, Mozart and Beethoven? :)

Day 33: Midyear Presentation

Ok, so yesterday we had our midyear assessment, marking the halfway point for Storkinators and our primary source of feedback from the HKU.

Midyear assessments entail a 10-minute long presentation by us to our project coordinator and an additional teacher who knows nothing about the project. The presentation must cover the work and research that has gone into the project thus far and the teachers grade us. It is important we pass this assessment or we could have the project terminated immediately. No pressure then.. :S

Actually, there wasn't any pressure. As far as projects going wrong at the HKU, we're totally in the clear. Our project coordinator (who has been monitoring our progress since the start) had full confidence in us that we would pass and we did. Yay us! ;)

We still have some things we were told we need to work on though, such as target audience research and play testing. Here's the official assessment we received (translated from Dutch). Ratings from lowest to highest are fail, pass, good and very good:


Conceptual Prestige: Pass
Artistic Prestige: Good
Technical Prestige: Pass
Integration Research and Design: Pass
Project Planning and Coordination: Pass
Team Work and Communication: Good
Professionalism: Good
Project Documentation: Pass
Strong aspects of the project:


- Humor
- Visual style, art very good
- Attempt at high-quality voice acting
Weak aspects of the project:

- Concept isn't mega innovative
- Target audience research (for instance: length of dialogue and holding attention VS static images. Pay attention to the fact that an 8 year old boy has different experiences with the world than a 12 year old girl.) Be careful for assumptions. Can the target audience understand the terms and themes in the game?
- Play testing
- Testing on tablets has not been done yet
- No phased planning with deadlines. When and were should something be done? (NOTE: We actually do have this, they just hadn't seen it yet before they wrote that.)
Issues to be solved before the final assessment
Overall feedback:

- Fun project, good job but target audience research and play testing is lacking.
- Is the term interactive audio book still applicable? Perhaps interactive story book augmented with audio? Or just a "normal" adventure game? Is it not possible to also include an interactive aspect with the music?

Final Grade: Good

Our target audience is probably the trickiest thing we have to tackle. We didn't really communicate our target audience correctly during the presentation. We feel our game should be enjoyable by people who are interested in the visual style, themes and gameplay regardless of age or experience in gaming. The problem is if you say that, it makes it out like you don't know what you're talking about. Also if you say your game must be suitable for 8 year old kids, it feels like the school interprets that as its ONLY for 8 year olds and no other age group. VERY aggravating! >:(

Some of this feedback might be down to us not communicating information correctly to the teacher who hasn't been following our project.  For instance, our aforementioned target audience issue and our planning, which actually is well kept on a chart on our wall that they didn't see until after the presentation. (Thanks Martin for pointing it out. ;P) There were also plenty of things pointed out that we hadn't focused on enough as well like play testing and the term describing our game.

All in all, it was certainly interesting to get an outsider perspective on our project and was a real kick in the butt for us to get more perspective on the project. Our project coordinator really stuck up for us and what we're doing too which really makes us feel we've got something with our game. *tear of joy* :,)

This is how we've interpreted the feedback from the midyear:

- We haven't communicated our target audience correctly and this caused confusion so we need to refine our definition. Today we looked at the design documents of games and cartoons with similar target audiences. We also looked more into the origins of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books, a big source of inspiration for our game (also Where in the World is Carmen San Diego?).
- We need to start play testing ASAP. We got the game working on a tablet today so we've already taken a big step in this direction. There's also 4 pages of bugs that need fixing...But hey, its a start. ;P

- We were planning on animating the illustrations a bit if we had the time at the end. Now we feel we definitely should do this as it adds a little extra feature to keep the attention of the player.

- Adding an interactive musical element is more of a "how I would do it" type feedback but we are going to add something along these lines later in the game. Oops... Gave something away there! :P

- We need a better definition of what our game is. When we started Storkinators, our concept was a 100% audio game you play on an MP3 player. It was this point we referred to our game as an interactive audio book. The game has grown a lot since then and this term is indeed a little misleading. Maybe Choose-Your-Own-Point-And-Click-Adventure App? Rolls off the tongue, doesn't it? At this point we're temped to make up a term so people don't badger on at us about what kind of game Storkinators is and just accept it for what it is. XD

Agh, can you tell we're worked up? Its not so bad, the midyear could have gone much worse but we've been working on Storkinators for about 2-3 months now and its our baby. We love it and care about it and want it to be great. That's the problem with game creation, you get so attached to your project if you're enjoying it. We as game creators have to put so much of ourselves into a game, that it becomes part of you.

Ho-hum...

On a final (more positive) note, check out what Erik (voice actor for the three composers) spotted today!

GIANT STORKS ARE ATTACKING! HIDE YOUR BABIES! D:

Day 32: Meet the Protagonists: Beethoven

Originally Beethoven was going to be based on the character Father Jack Hackett from Irish television show Father Ted. Father Jack is a foul mouthed, near-deaf, alcoholic priest with a bad attitude. His dialogue in the show (with few exceptions) consists of the words “Drink” “feck” “arse” “girls” or “what?” Choosing this characterization for Beethoven was meant to make fun of Beethoven’s fiery temper and deafness in his later life.

(left )Father Jack Hackett from Irish television show Father Ted, (Right) the first design for Beethoven

If you are unfamiliar with Father Jack, here's all the introduction you need: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdkN57xvekI

When script writing began for Storkinators it was soon apparent that having three characters like this meant there wasn't much room for interesting dialogue. In Storkinators, most of the information has to be brought to the player through audio and dialogue. If we only have a brat, a one-liner guy and a guy who always says “what?”, it would be very difficult to bring any information across at all. Eventually we came across a very interesting paper on Beethoven called The Story of a Composer: Ludwig van Beethoven, A Composer Made of Fire. Read it here, its really good: http://www.artsalive.ca/pdf/mus/beethoven_all_e.pdf

Reading this paper, we learned about Beethoven’s extremely interesting life and attitude. We realized he was actually a very cool guy who was larger than life, liked women, coffee and smoking, had a fiery attitude, lots of friends and rebelled against how musicians were treated during the 18^th century. He was like the 18^th century’s equivalent of an Indie Musician! His motto was “Composers are made of Fire”, which captures how intensely he held music in high regard. In short, Beethoven was much too interesting a person to reduce his character to just his deafness and temper. His hearing was only impaired later in life as well so we went for a younger Beethoven who is still able to hear and full of fire. We still subtly attempted to include deafness in his personality by making him stubborn and a little pigheaded. He doesn’t listen to other people proverbially rather than literally.

An early sketch that is more in the direction of Beethoven’s final design

When writing the dialogue for the three protagonists, the approach taken is that the three behave like a family. Each character fulfills a role typically associated with a family, with Beethoven being the father-figure (The leader who makes final decisions for the family), Bach being the Mother (nurtures and protects the family) and Mozart the child (curious about the world and sometimes rebellious against parents). This really makes the characters click well together even if you are unaware of this approach to writing their dialogue. It is hinted at throughout the script: In Egypt Beethoven is mistaken as Mozart’s father and it is jokes that Bach must be the mother, Beethoven asks Mozart to stay close in the Amazon and Mozart exclaims “You’re not my dad you know!”. An added oddity to this is that Mozart has a father who supported him in every way and Beethoven’s father was horrible to him. They fulfill for each other the father they didn't have. Beethoven doesn't blindly support everything Mozart does but is patient and at the very least does treat Mozart with kindness, unlike Beethoven’s father did him.

And thus concludes our little Meet the Protagonists bit! We hope you've enjoyed these last few posts and we may do more in future if we think of anything else to write about. Today we had our midyear presentation but we'll write about it tomorrow. Its time to go home. :P

Day 31: Meet the Protagonists: Bach

Bach has changed the least during the process creating Storkinators. His personality is a parody of Arnold Schwarzenegger and is based on a pun from The Terminator: I’ll be back.

 Bach’s character in a single image

Not the most intellectual thing to shape a character around I’m sure, but it appears to have worked in our favor as Bach is a fan-favorite within the Storkinators Team. (No offence Beethoven and Mozart, we love you too.) As time went on, Bach has become gentler and subtly emotional rather than just a one-liner spitting robot. Well, he still is really, but at least he is a one-liner spitting robot with a heart and soul.

Bach’s first design. Notice the Terminator reference in his eye

Tomorrow we will cover our third and final character, Beethoven. There's a lot to tell about this character so look forward to it. :)

Day 31: Meet the Protagonists: Mozart

We've covered a lot of the art, sound and game play aspects of Storkinators in this blog. Starting today we're going to look into the protagonists' personalities and why we chose to portray them that way, starting with Mozart.

Mozart is a prodigy child who, unfortunately, knows how smart he is. He is a bratty, stuck up know-it-all who revels in the fact that he is usually right, making him even more irritating. During early conceptualization, we described Mozart as being similar to Cubert Farnsworth from Futurama. Mozart’s first design even looked kind of like him until we got of our lazy artist butts and came up with something less derivative.

Cubert Farnsworth and Mozart’s first design

Next up: Bach.