Immersion Analysis
Building Virtual World
Introduction:
Building Virtual Worlds is almost the most famous course in ETC which I knew its name before I came here. Although each rounds in ETC lasted no more than three weeks, much work was required that always cost me spend my weekends in ETC. At the same time, what I learned and achieved were also beyond my expectation.
Round One:
Cupid’s Office was the first world that I participated create for BVW. Our team were assigned the Meta 2 AR platform. We had to make a game that the guest had to help character A who is afraid of character B. Almost other teams chose it to be simple— helping A get rid of B, however, our ream wanted to dig deeper into this theme—helping A overcome his/her fear. Everyone in this team was so excited about this idea and was so eager to build a big map to express it. However, because of that, we were unaware of how much work we should do in two weeks. So, after first interim presentation, we found that we must change our plans to adapt the deadline. We had an urgent meeting in the very beginning of the second week and we tried to make our game simple--not only mechanisms, but also the whole story. Things worked when we changed our plans. The lesson we learned from this round is that always scope your work before doing it and always be ready to change.
Round Two:
For round two, we were asked to build an experience for a naive guest that was both intuitive and freeing. Instead of telling guests about rules or controls or gestures that involved in the game, we need to use indirect controls to let guests know what to do next. It is hard because we also want our guests to feel free when playing our game. Our team decided the interaction first, that is drawing. We thought that drawing is intuitive when you are given a spray can and can be really free. But, one of the biggest challenge is what guests can do and what they should do in our game because the guest started to draw everywhere and did nothing to the story progress. So, based on the feedback of our guests, we decided to sacrifice some part of freedom to get some controls of the game. It seemed like a wrong decision in the end for the guest who is playing our game later felt not freedom at all. The result was really frustrated because we changed exactly the same as they wanted us to do. However, we figured out later that we cannot rely on opinions of single person and we should make decisions after enough play testing.
Round Three:
Round three is a lightning round. With only one week to design and build a world based on fun, and without the aid of an interim review and feedback, we were forced into a tight spot to begin with. Our team decided on the first day that we should keep it simple—just focus on one interaction and one mechanism to make the game as fun as possible. However, after rounds of story development and trying to layer in as much as possible, we found that keep it simple proved to be a challenge. Then we started to put our previous thoughts away and took advantage of the body movement detection of Kinect2 to build the game. We developed and implemented the game named Open Sesame in which guests need to use their hands and feet and solve the puzzles to open the door. We finished the game-play in three days and spent two whole days for play-test and iteration. We iterated multiple times and I felt that play testing is the key to find problems and improve the game.
Round Four:
Storytelling is always a tough topic. We spent three days brainstorming what kinds of stories we want to tell. We threw multiple ideas like bank robberies, a surprise proposal, pets rescue, etc., but none of them was neither playable nor a complete story. Our team met with mentors for three times before we eventually settling on a theme of “woo who” using the background story of Romeo and Juliet. We added very intriguing interactions like playing the violin, juggling and singing opera in this journey. The most challenging part is how to express this story to the guest and make him part of our story in 2-3 minutes. We tried to add a magic frog to play as the god father to help the guest and a competitor to bring more tension and competition to the guest. Also, thinking of interest curves of the game, we added several surprises and twists. Fortunately, everything worked very well—both the game and the story were fun. All the struggles at the beginning were worth it and we are so proud of our world.
Round Five:
Then came the round five, the all for festival round. Our team chose to do multi-player network game with no hesitation because we really wanted to push it to the festival. We had more time in this round and we applied what we learned in previous rounds to this world. In our game, guests could throw bouncing balls as weapons and use the shield to defend the attack. One of the biggest challenge was that the simulation of throwing balls in VR was not as good as we thought. In this case, we kept doing play testing and analyzed all the feedbacks from our guests carefully. Overall, we changed the algorithm for five times before the final presentation. Also, another problem was network. Network game was harder than we all expected, so we spent an entire week struggling with it and I learned a lot from this round.
Festival:
Festival is super tired but super fun. It is unexpected that our round three world Open Sesame is selected to be in the festival. Our team shared the room with another team and we need to redesign part of our theming plans because of that. I spent three whole days drawing, cutting and painting with my teammates and I never thought that we can make the room so great. On the festival, we got 78 groups of people to play our game and received lots of comments and praises. Seeing guests playing our world with cheers and laughter, I never ever felt more satisfying.
Teamwork:
It is a really good opportunity to learn teamwork in BVW. Though each round lasted no more than three weeks, I learned a lot from it. First, communication is really important. When people in the team are free to express their thoughts, opinions, and potential solutions to problems and are willing to spend their time listening deeply while others are speaking, it is usually easier for the team to achieve success. Second, the clear direction and agreement on mission and purpose is essential for effective teamwork. Team members should have an overall mission that is agreed upon and that provides the umbrella for all the team tries to do. Also, always trust your teammates even though the team is about to taking risks in changing plans. Things are often not developed as we imagined, so to trust each other is the key to go through with changes. Last but not the least, participative leadership is essential during the teamwork. I thought it is easy to be a producer in the team as you do not need to programming or modeling, but it was actually difficult as you need to lead meetings, record decisions and feedbacks, assess progress, hold team members accountable and provide directions for the team.
Feedback:
This was the first time I got a chance to get my feedback not only on my projects but also on myself from both instructors and teammates. It was excited and nervous to hear/read their feedback. Sometimes feedback was good that we were very glad to see, but sometimes feedback was really negative that caused frustration. And also, feedback can be different from person to person, it was hard to decide which one we need to listen to. But through BVW, I learned to appreciate and be positive on good or bad comments for they both can improve performance in some way. And I found that feedback is a really important tool for continued learning. We took each step forward, learned to improve with the help of feedbacks. Learning and iterating will never end.
Conclusion:
The biggest lesson from all of rounds is: try everything and don’t afraid of failure. Spend your time building things to see them work or not work, not sitting around talking about whether they will work. Try new steps, feel comfortable to take risks and always ready for change. BVW pushed me to my creative limits to design and build things that work. More importantly, it pushed me to my limits of working with others, being ready to fail and being okay with that. Before BVW, I never thought about being a game designer in the future, but now I think this will be a good choice. I have been immensely grateful for the opportunity to be in BVW and I have had a great time. Thanks Jesse. Thanks Dave. Thanks my teammates.
Visual Story
Introduction:
In addition to knowledge about visual concepts, Visual Story to me is more about applying what you learned and trying new things. Besides, I had a semester-long team named Funky Cheese Factory and I really had fun working while playing with them.
48 hours’ film:
It was the real first time our team made our own film. And, it was a rapid production round since we only had 48 hours to build a complete film from scripting to editing. I took charge of storyboards and acting and other teammates were responsible for editing and shooting. From my perspective, good storyboards and clear scripts helped a lot when shooting the film. Though pre-production took me about 4 hours, it still worth it. We saved much time and arranged every scene in order while shooting.
VR 360:
It was my first time to shoot 360 degree VR film, so were my teammates. None of us had experience before. How to control or guide guests to look at the direction we want them to see was the most difficult part in this round. So we made our main character keep moving around so that guests would follow his movements to look around without losing attention. Another challenge for VR film was the frame cuts. If you cannot process the frame cuts well, it would be very weird. Because of the story, we couldn’t avoid frame cuts, so we tried to limit the number of them. It worked well with sound added into it.
Music Video:
The biggest challenge of this round was time management as it was in Thanksgiving. Our team managed a whole day before Thanksgiving for shooting, switching between 7 places around Pittsburgh. It was very tired that I need to keep dancing all the way. Also, since the real situation was totally different from what we thought, we changed a lot during progress. Arranging pieces of footages together and telling a story with music cost us a lot of time.
Conclusion:
I learned many technical knowledge in storytelling and visual composition during the whole semester. My contribution to visual story assignments of team mainly lay in pre-production and acting. Though I was familiar with storyboards and scripts, I knew nothing about acting. This class pushed me to try new things and be brave to perform in front of the public. Also, this class pushed me to adapt for changes and be open-minded when things go beyond what we thought. Thanks John. Thanks Ralph. Thanks Funky Cheese Factory.
Improv
Introduction:
Improv is a relaxing course for me during the whole semester. The exercises in the class were fun and educational. I learned a lot of lessons when joined in these exercises, even some of them were very simple and short.
Drawing in Pairs:
Drawing in Pairs is a fast-collaborative and fun exercise in which you and your partner take turns adding a single stroke to make a face until one person hesitates and sign the name in the end. This game taught us to think on the fly and it pushed me to adapt for changes and be open-minded when things go beyond what I thought. It also helped us prepare for when we work on projects over which we don’t have individual control but we have to defend the final product as a team.
Marketing Team:
This is an exercise that we worked in groups of six to plan a campaign for a household appliance that does something extraordinary. We need to think the name of the product, the main customers, the slogan,the spoke-person, the commerical and the theme song. The theme song part was the most interesting one I liked most, because it needs you to think fast and it combines everyone’s ideas. The whole process allowed ideas to get expanded upon rather than shut down. It made me feel so good that everyone in the team throw their thoughts in, even sometimes the idea was nonsense at all, and we just worked on that idea and added details to make sense. Group brainstorm happens everywhere, this exercise helped me a lot since I worked on BVW and Visual Story and it will help me when it comes to working in a company.
Unrelated Conversation:
This is the exercise I liked most in Improv. It was my first time to speak my native language among the class. Before this exercise, I felt nervous about expressing myself in improv and after this exercise, I felt that foreign language could not be the barrier to keep me from communication. The lessons I learned from this exercise were: First, a comfortable conversation often happens when each one of us in this conversation have chances to express our ideas and feel free to take turns to talk. Also, eye contact and body language like nodding, smiling would be helpful to encourage others to talk more and helpful for interruption. Last but not the least, even though you cannot understand what they are talking, you still can join in this conversation. Just be brave to express yourself.
"Simple Where" Building a Scene:
Simple Where is an exercise that we were grouped into six and each of us did one activity to build a scene. It was fun to look from audiences’ side because sometimes the team was not presenting the same world. But even if the person before you added the activity that didn’t make sense at all, you still could add things to help it look right. I still remember that the first person of one team performed sitting while reading and the second person performed pulling toilet paper afterwards, the scene changed from the library to the toilet, but it still made sense.The lesson I learned form this was: First, sometimes you have to adapt others to change instead of correcting others. It happens a lot when you work in a company, you do not have a chance to change the plan, so what you need to do is be adaptable and always be ready for change. Also, details matter a lot because even just one small action may change the whole situation.
Conclusion:
Although after finishing this class, I still cannot improv well, but I think I am no more afraid of improv now. What I learned in Improv helped me in other courses like Visual Story and Building Virtual Worlds. Thanks Brenda.
Fundamentals
Shadow project:
Shadow project was a good chance for me to take a close look at a semester-long project that second-year students developed. I chose to be in the TheatAR project because this project was position-based entertainment and combined AR technology with live performing. This team was adapting an existing story to the stage featuring a fully-realized animated character that performed alongside a human actor. We had two meetings together and we talked a lot about TheatAR like how this idea came out, how to make this idea real, what was the biggest challenge, and etc. What I learned from this two meetings were: First, be brave to pitch your idea and make it real. Second, communicating with your client often will help your team to find the right direction.
Conclusion:
The assignments of Fundamentals covered multiple areas of entertainment technology industry. I learned how to prepare for a job interview and how to build my personal website. Also, most importantly, it helped me find out my direction—what I want to pursue and what I should and need to do to improve myself in the future. Thanks Drew. Thanks Mike. Thanks all.