18/2/13 - Presentation Review, 4 week plan

PRESENTATION FEEDBACK

The main points of feedback from my presentation were:

• Possibly separate the factors so they all produce different scores.

This would make a lot of sense as some of the factors may not have an affect on specific interactions, possibly causing an inaccurate  response. So work will need to be done once a list of interactions is formed into which factors affect what interaction and why...add it to the to do list.

• Don't worry about breaking the model.

I kinda already knew that breaking the model wouldn't be a bad thing and that i could probably learn more from making a model that fails than having one that seemingly works by the end of it. I think i'd be suspicious of a model that worked because i'd probably have missed something vital from my research. Despite this, it was nice hearing it from the lecturers.

• Worry less about theory for the moment and more about animating.

This is kind of the point I've reached at the moment anyway. I feel like I've reached a point in my research that making the animations wont be premature.

• Self criticism for the actual animations

There was a suggestion of looking at acting DVDs to help analyse the effectiveness of my animations which i'll look into later this month. 

I was the last person to present this time round which meant the lecturers had been listening to presentations all day, they had collectively managed to run over by about an hour so understandably they'd started to become a little brain dead so i'm very grateful for the feedback i was given.

FUTURE PLAN

The thing i like most about presentations is that it forces you to take a step back from your project. Look at where you've come from and where you're going instead of focusing on the one tiny bit of it that you're actually working on. Its a nice little checkpoint to check you're still heading towards where you thought you were going at the beginning and flags up areas you may need to think about more. There's a small list of things i'm going to need to investigate at some point that will be crucial to my final showcase/presentation that this checkpoint has flagged up. So, so i don't forget them;

• List of interactions

START NOW

To know what i'm going to be animating i need to know what interactions are needed. To do this i'll need to spend a lot of time watching other people play games and making notes of things they do to NPCs. This will be pretty boring and time consuming but its vital. So do it when you have no energy to move.

• Work out a default animation for each of the interactions made

ANIMATE FIRST

For time sake, probably have to use general consensus of peers to determine what would be the default reaction to a situation.

• Test the score model as it is.

ANIMATE FIRST

Without splitting it up into separate parts, like the feedback suggests, use the factors to create score for existing characters from games. Ask around to get a general consensus of how people think the character would react to situations (and why?) and then evaluate it against what the score says they would do.

• Part two of testing score model

ANIMATE FIRST

Because it's going to go wrong somewhere... use the results from the previous test to investigate which factors shouldn't be included in which interactions and try and point out why this is.

I'll add to this is i remember anything else, it seems a weekend was a bit too long to wait...