A Public Exhibition

This week, I will finish preparations for the open house and then provide some analysis of the results as well as the first draft of my second-year review’s thesis proposal.

Introduction

So with this week being the week of open house, Rae and I dedicated all our energy to polishing up Role Call formally titled Project: Theatre so that it would be ready to present to the public. In the end, we successfully managed to implement almost all our desired features after having to make some tough calls as to what to keep and drop in order to make the demo not be too long for a public exhibition (we aimed for about 20 minutes). In the end however, we still managed to have too much content and did have a large amount of people go beyond 20 minutes yet only one person didn’t finish the demo and most said they were actually sad that they couldn’t see any more of the game. However, despite the focus being on Role Call several other aspects of my thesis did manage to get further developed.

The Dialogue Permutation System (DPS)

While this week did not end up resulting in many grand discoveries for DPS, I took the advice of my advisor and stepped back from the current progress to reflect on the current findings I’ve reached this semester. In the end, this resulted in the creation of two new artifacts and the obtaining of some example cases that I can use in my thesis proposal. Below are the artifacts and example cases

Figure 1: Findings from Versu Exploration

Figure 2: Example of Mass Effect 2 Using The Same Dialogue Regardless of NPC Involved

Figure 3: Example of Baldur's Gate 3 using unique dialogue depending on the NPC involved in the scene

Figure 4: Caculations of the differences in the amount of lines required between the two industry methods and DPS

In addition however, I also went through and created the first draft of my thesis proposal with it being the culmination of all the work I’ve done this past year with even some mentions of Project Conversation: RoboCat. Overall, with the semester coming to a close, it felt like a good time to get my ducks in a row as I shift towards second year review preparations with the conclusion of open house. The next steps now will be to discuss with my advisor the first draft proposal before then sending it out to my committee for review. From there, I will need to incorporate the feedback received from my committee as I construct my second year review presentations.

Role Call

For Role Call, I had two goals going into this week:

1. Finalize the demo for the open house

2. Ascertain the current state of the project to determine if Role Call can successfully serve as a game environment to use to evaluate my system

To achieve these, I first analyzed the feedback from a recent thesis review I had from my peers, a play test session with one of my committee members, and a few more playtests with my friends. Then from there, I sought out the original UI artist for the first prototype, Sophia Reeder, and, after conducting an analysis of the current state of the project and goals that were needed to be accomplished, they went and redesigned the UI once again to further polish up the experience. I from there, incorporated the new design and the feedback received. Then, I began working with my thesis partner Rae to combine our two systems together into a single playable experience. Additionally, noticing that none of the other menus had been touched since the original whiteboxing, I also went through and redesigned the other menus within the experience. In the end, the game received much needed polish and we then presented it to the public for feedback. Below are a collection of the new and improved menus and a link to the playable build.

Figure 5: New Rehersal Menu Designed by Sophia Reeder

Figure 6: New Assignment Screen developed by Skye Winters and Sophia Reeder

Figure 6: New Title Screen developed by Skye Winters

https://www.asc.ohio-state.edu/winters.353/TheatrePlaytest/?v=1.0.0&cb=cb%3D1776032138208 

During the public showing of the ACCAD open house, Rae and I ended up exhibiting the game for three hours across four different computers. Between the two of us, we managed to successfully have someone playing the game at each station nearly the entire exhibition thus allowing us to gather 31 unique responses. Overall, we managed to receive a score from players of 7.8 / 10 stars with many of the players providing useful feedback for us to review. In terms of DPS specifically, the initial feedback seems to suggest it indeed was effective at achieving unique characterizations with over 85% of players feeling as though the characters each felt unique. Additionally, the game was indeed able to maintain players' flow states with over 90% of players feeling focused throughout the rehearsal and over 70% of players feeling very to completely focused. As such, the feedback received seems to positively indicate the game is indeed a viable candidate to use for evaluating the usefulness of DPS in maintaining characterization.

The next steps from here will be to create a task list with all the current lingering tasks based on the feedback we received and beginning to implement those changes. Additionally, to begin working with Teresa to develop the IRB to evaluate an empirical comparison of DPS against the two other industry techniques of shared dialogue lines or unique per character dialogue lines. 

Believability Study

This week, I continued finalizing with Teresa the believability study. After discussing last week what elements should be included in the final metric, I spent the remaining week and a half putting together a collection of five stimuli videos incorporating groups of three 15-30 second clips of low believability characters. With the stimuli now being finalized, all that is left is to run a pilot study of the current materials before sending off our IRB with the calculated study length for approval so that next semester we can begin testing.

Conclusion

Overall, this week has left me more tired than usual between the big milestones across all three large categories of my thesis. However, I am super proud of the progress that has been made this semester and I am looking forward to starting to prepare for my upcoming second-year review.

Until next week, logging off.