#;evaluation

the cold air of November does nothing to freeze out the excitement that doyum feels being out in an area that he--once upon a time--use to spend a lot of his time. his old stomping grounds, one might call it. back before he was signed, this is where his busking group would perform a few times. it brings back so many memories and he can’t help but bounce in place as the excitement runs through his veins. 

he can see a few of his fans from busking days already lined up in the front to get a good spot and he can only wonder how they knew he would be there. regardless, it makes him smile and he doesn’t hesitate to wave when he catches their eyes. it earns him a few squeals and he can’t help the grin when he see’s them all whip out their phones. 

it does catch him by surprise when he spots the large camera aimed his way through as he was sure his old fansites wouldn’t still be around. 

this all adds to his excitement and he’s more than ready to get going. so he tries to throw off some of the energy by stretching out his limbs, making sure he’s loose and not risking hurting himself. it’d be lame if he hurt himself during busking.... he could already hear hyojeong mocking him for it. 

when the music is kicked on, even though he isn’t up dancing yet, doyum still dances at the back. cheering for his sunbae who are the ones performing right now. it’s probably the most energetic anyone in trc has ever seen him but there’s just something about busking that brings this out of him. something about performing for real people that gets his blood running. 

And thus we finish our game and sent it out to peers to play after a few testers and our own testing through and finally getting the codes right. Though overall we got things done, we could’ve stayed on schedule so much better in order to have ample amount of time to test and try things out.

I would have given much more time on the script because after seeing everything there is a lot I would change and add especially more towards  the sex trade within the script and refining it much more.

With the codes, I think we would’ve really liked to try using Unity or Haxe instead to see which may have helped us make the coding smoother. But we would’ve experimented with other programmes if we could. 

Overall I think we’re really proud with what we manage to do in the amount of time we have even though we know that so much more could be better, script, graphic and code wise.

Coding and Issues

Coding was definitely a pain.

Because it was chat bubble by bubble, we had to code in 14 pages worth of script into the application and then link the branched of choices together. I helped do most of the manual labour of putting them all in.

We came across plenty of issues as well as limitations of wanting to do more but may not have the time to figure out.

16k frame limit - That was the biggest set back we had when everything had been into the application and then the whole thing stops working because we hit the frame limit which was not told by Animate that there was even a limit, we did not check that carefully and that set us back a whole day in order to recode everything with Frank’s help as pausing the frame instead of dragging more frames in order to read the lines.

Push notifications, Scrolling, Running in the Background, and Local Data - all of these were things we tried to make work but decided to let it go in order to make things simpler and less complicated, as it may not necessarily add to the story and takes too much time.

Input Text field - we had to figure out the AS3 code with Chris’ help in order to make it work, if there was one fancy thing we wanted, we wanted to be able to put in a passcode the audience has to find on the website or Red will be stuck in the loop of the hostel all over again.

Script (link)

I wrote the script, and with the comments and suggestions made a few changes from the story beats.

During the pitch of our statement of Intent, we got some feedback on the project and taken down some notes of what we could do with the idea

Is it too ambitious? We did acknowledge the scale of this project however we rather let our imagination go wild right now and realise that and then scale back on what we can actually do, at least we will be exploring all our options where we want to bring this project to.

Focus more on giving a rich story, well craft characters. With a project that has story at its heart and spine, we will need to give a lot of thought into the plot and characters we want in it.

Make sure that the installation actually adds value to the story. Many were wondering if the whole project could simply do with just the mobile app and without all the physical space. The fact that we’ll have to build a whole space and make that believable enough and with our resources as a three man team, it was hard. And to add that on to making the mobile application. Can it work with just the application? Simply making the mobile application alone may be a feat for us, and I completely agree. Though Gabriella held onto the installation idea quite tightly.

Final Cut