This is a mind map of all the problems that I encountered during this project. There were many Audio, Visual, Interactive, and Logistics problems that I faced and I had to overcome them to ensure that I completed the project and met all the criteria.
In week one of our production we watched an introductory video to the Age of Napoleon project. This video informed us of the crucial story elements that we will have to work with in our project. We also discussed the project and what we would be creating throughout and what our tasks would be and we talked about why we were doing this task and what we can learn from it.
After this we chose factions for the project in our design teams. My team, Wet Flame Studios, chose the spy faction and were told a bit about our character, Louis Daguerre, who we would work with when doing this project. The other two groups chose the factions the Resistance and Napoleons army.
We also created mood boards to get an idea of the feel we would want to convey in our dossiers. The mood boards I created included examples of paper of the time to give me an idea of the fonts that could be used on our dossier and what textures we could use for our paper to make it look like its from the 1870s. I also included example of some weapons that the spy’s could use and we could maybe adapt for our dossier to look like they have had pieces of the tesseract infused into them to power them.
We also did research on Louis Daguerre as he is important to the spy faction and we needed to know more about him so that we could create our story and include accurate information. We put the information we found into a mock social media profile for Daguerre.
Finally we identified potential problems we might have during this project, that relate to interactivity, audio, visual, and logistics. Some of the interactivity problems we discussed include the buttons we are going to have, such as how they will work and what they will be. Also how the user will interact with the dossier and how we will engage them in the dossier in the best way. Some of the visual problems we discussed included the text we will have and how we will make it look like its from the time the game is set and if we include any images or videos how will we make them look accurate for the time period. Audio problems we discussed include the scripts for any audio, and what language we will use to make it seem its from the time period, and also how we will control our environment so that the recordings don’t have any distracting background sounds that interfere with the dialogue. For logistics we talked about how we will keep our dossiers consistent by having themes that we agree on as a group and make sure our layouts are consistent when they need to be and also how we can improve our workflow to ensure we compete the task within the deadline and how we could organize our work to help with this.
In week one of this project I learnt how to make an object look like it is glowing in 3DS Max by adding a pulsing glow effect, and also I learnt how to make an object look like it has something inside it. I applied these skills to the 3D model of the tesseract that I made. To make the tesseract look like there was something inside it I added layers I had crated in Photoshop using paint to create a pattern that looks to the center of the tesseract so that it looked like it had a cloud of energy inside of it. I positioned these layers at different angles and positions in the center so that it didn’t create just one shape. To create the effect that the tesseract was glowing I selected the self illumination check-box and set the index of refraction to -1 and then used the key-frames to select when the tesseract would be illuminated and when it wouldn’t.
I could apply these skills to my project if I needed to create an object that needed to glow slightly, for example if I was creating a model of a weapon that used the tesseracts power and had a part that glowed like the tesseract.
I did not encounter any problems when I was applying these skills as they were simple processes and I was able to do them easily with only a little help.
If I were doing this again I would do the pattern I made in Photoshop different so that it looks more like energy and when its placed in the center of the tesseract it looks more like a cloud so that it creates a better effect.
We also talked about interactivity and everything we will need to include to make our dossiers interactive, by engaging the audience in the product through things like buttons and icons. Also we discussed navigation of our interactive materials and how we will need to make it easy to navigate for everyone.
liamsmithinteractive 