Team Size: 13
Timeframe: 5 months
Sprint Timeframe: 7 weeks
Role: Interactive Editor (Lead)
Key Contributions: i1-4 (add yogurt, milk, sugar, and fruit)
Learning Prompt: How does a lassi get made? (encourage Nutrition)
Date Sprint Completed: January 2023
Molly and Spats are back for a new episode of School of Yum! Today, we will be making a sweet and fruity lassi, and Spats will indeed be testing our dish once it is completed.
School of Yum (SOY) is meant to teach certain cooking skills with a series of innovative interactions whilst also encouraging nutritional aspects of diet. Pre-production involves full-on live film shoots of the cooking materials and ingredients before being transferred to animation and the interactive editors.
On this project, I worked as lead interactive editor over the course of a 7-week period (made longer due to overlapping with the holidays) between December 2022 and January 2023. The SOY series requires less master logic than the Missions series, but being lead still means taking on all of the responsibilities of “owning” a project (i.e. holding the core project file on your computer, running exports, and uploading updates to Box and gitHub).
Additionally, with the other interactive editor on the project, Cristian Duran, taking on the more back-end customizable aspects of the project, and a very challenging interaction in that of the blender, I was in charge of the first half of the experience, from adding yogurt to cutting your chosen fruit.
The yogurt and sugar interactions (i1, i3, respectively) are nearly identical, each with a drag-drop interaction of the spoon asset that goes “invisible” if you let go and “drop” it into the bowl. This programmatic asset then links particles to its position, that get activated if the player gets close enough to the measuring cup / blender.
In the case of the yogurt interaction, it takes place over a series of six “steps” of the interaction, so aspects of “completion” logic could be held in different keyframes without affecting others, whilst the sugar interaction all takes place in one keyframe, meaning that the intricacies of (a) when the spoon is active, (b) which “version” of the spoon is visible, (c) angling the spoon correctly so that it appears flush when you “drop” it in the bowl but also balanced so that it’s not too vertical; all had to be very precise.
The milk interaction (i2) required the milk’s rotation to be linked to its horizontal position, and because the milk’s starting position is not programmatically “X=0,” a math equation needed to be constructed to calculate the milk’s current position vs. its starting position, and then link that value to a rotation that had to align to the milk’s required rotation upon completion of the interaction.
With me so far?
Finally, after selecting your fruit (i4A), the logic for the fruit-cutting interaction (i4B) was able to be re-used from SOY101 (see a deeper explanation of this logic here).
However, the positions of the various trace components and the trace line needed to be slightly altered to accommodate the fruit.
After blending it all together, it seems that Spats enjoyed the Lassi. We hope to see you in season 2 of School of Yum, Spats!
Matthew Floyd 