Team Size: 13
Timeframe: 5 months
Sprint Timeframe: 6 weeks
My Timeframe: 3 weeks
Role: Interactive Editor
Key Contributions: General, Transitional
Learning Prompt: Self-identity
Date Sprint Completed: July 2023
Let’s spend a day with Kale and learn about some of the things he does. Maybe we’ll learn some things about ourselves!
New episodes of Big Hearts Activity Books (BHAB) are meant to encourage various emotional skills in players, in this case self-identity.
For this project, I only worked on it for about two and a half weeks, implementing several prototypes (below) delivered by one of the project’s interactive editors, Cristian Duran, whilst its other interactive editor, Hyacinth Ramsay, was returning from vacation.
I designed the skin the logic of the third activity, Paint by Numbers (PBN), involving a nested drawing interaction that combines several different delivered mattes laid on top of one another.
And otherwise worked on taking the prototype logic in the second activity, Kale’s stickers, and updating it with new idle/timeout logic and disable/enable logic.
For instance, the prototype’s idle logic involved your guide in the experience, Zooli, giving you hints when you idle, whereas the updated logic needed Zooli’s icon to glow, and then only if you click her do you get the hint (see above). This project’s core interactive editor, Bianca Ignacio, already had templates of this new idle logic, but updating this activity with it took some time.
Various audios in the second activity also needed to be implemented, several of which (i.e. the introduction prompts upon entering each sticker) require touch input to be disabled. In the activity, only four sticker interactions are active in a given playthrough, but there are a total of six possible sticker interactions that you can experience (see above).
Once Hyacinth returned from vacation, I worked on managing the interactions I was working on up through our given round of playtesting in July 2023 so that our handoff could be seamless.
Matthew Floyd 