#projectaethos

We ran into some technical trouble with my servo mechanism that held the book at the end of open studio evening, and we were unsure if it was going to be a permanent issue or not. We tried again to run the project through on the following Monday for some of the BCT students that had missed out on giving the installation a go. It turned out the book servo had been pretty much destroyed by supporting the weight of the book and no longer had a proper connection to be able to be controlled. This, along with a range of other technical issues to do with the programming, meant that we could no longer run the game through. This was our intention for the installation to be immortalised on the night and exist in documentation and player response, however, it was a shame that there were so many who wanted to try it that could not give it a go. While we managed to get everything almost entirely functional for open studio, there was almost no future proofing, and this really showed. I think that doing this project again, or another project with this same style of existing solely on the night, I would consider using methods that would allow for quick and easy repairs for a couple of times so that the project could potentially be run a few times for a couple of hours each. This would help to get a much large number of responses than we could get on Open studio night as well since this would allow us to show it to much more people, and potentially be able to demo functional versions if there were industry professionals who were not there on open studio night.

My role during open studio ended up being one of the front-men maintaining “selling” people on the project and managing the queue since we could only have one person or group at a time and this meant that as people wanted to try it we had to have them wait for a while. This was posing a problem since wait times very quickly stacked up and we did not want people to have to be milling about in the reception area we had set up, away from all of the other studio works. After a while of making it work or having people patiently wait, we started using a texting queue system. Ben proposed that we take people’s numbers and have them peruse the other projects and that we would give them a text when it was time to have them run through. This ended up working much better and by the end of the night, we had a very effective system. Despite this working out, I think that there was definitely room for improvement in how we operated this system. It was given a low priority compared to the actual project, which meant that as a casualty of time pressure we did not end up being able to invest the necessary time into figuring out a good queue system. While I don’t think this seriously detracted from anything, it is something that I noted could have done with some better preparation for the sake of having things run smoothly.

That being said I think that having to have a queue really improved the mystery and mythos that surrounded our project to those seeing all the posters. I felt it created this type of exclusivity that further added to immersing people in this idea that they were users testing a company’s product. It was, however, a double-edged sword. This exclusivity and queue system meant that we couldn’t show off our work and the effort we had put in to anywhere near as many people as I would have liked. We had an idea for a screen that could show people who weren’t interested in having to sit through the whole experience what was happening, but due to the allocation of space and running out of time and resources to get together these presentational luxuries we weren’t able to do so, meaning that it was only the 13 people or groups that got to play through that really got to see what was involved.

One of the things that seemed to really add to the mystery for participants before they went in were the waivers. In the interest of making sure that people were okay to be recorded for our documentation and that they were not photosensitive or likely to have problems of anxiety or paranoia due to what we were talking about, we drew up and made waivers that participants had to sign in order to be able to enter. This idea, however, that they had to sign a waiver, a document often associated with danger, really seemed to heighten the feeling of intrigue and add to the mythos that we were creating.

These problems aside we received some excellent feedback and the only things that I would change in future projects of a similar style would be in smoothing out the queue system and in making people that didn’t want to invest so much time able to have some look at the what we had done. I was very much happy with what we ended up with and even more so on the open studio night when people would finish up in the room and come back out to the “reception” desk we had set up and congratulate and compliment our work.

The project had the majority of its functionality implemented without us having to invest too much time outside of what we normally would do week to week, however, it was getting the last pieces of functionality and the cleaning and presenting of the space that put time pressures on us.

We did not manage to get the UE4 build quite to the state that I would have liked, as we still had some quite relevant bugs, but that was the nature of some of the elements, such as the portals which seem to have posed technical challenges for the team doing the construction of the UE4 side of the project. The portals provided a vital and very potent element of the level layout, especially in the non-Euclidean section, although I can’t help but feel as though some of the portals outside of this area could have been replaced with different level layout in order to streamline the process. As this was not my working area I don’t realistically know enough about the workflow to know if this would have made a meaningful difference, but the portals sometimes appeared to be complicating things. My crunch came in making sure that the physical installation elements were made and working. Admittedly I think that my time management was lacking when it came to prioritising elements of the installation, as I noticed a handful of times that I would be focusing on making things passable but not very consistent and moving on. I think that I would have benefited from getting things done as I was working on them, to try and avoid as much of the time wasted by getting back into the head space of the different things I was working on. Moving off of something helped when I was stuck and needed to come back, but some things I started doing almost to procrastinate what was in front of me. I managed to get the physical puzzle elements we wanted in and functional, but I can’t help but feel like I could have been much more efficient and could have spent time making elements such as the book servo able to last longer.

The LED strip lighting setup

Hard drive cage and hard drives that made up the hard drive puzzle

Max headed the charge on the graphic design and marketing, but in some of my moments of procrastination or spare time I took the opportunity to offer my titbits of advice, provide an external look at some of the design, and even tried my hand at some of the graphic design. This was partially out of interest in helping the project but also in helping lay the groundwork for me to start building skills in some of these elements.

One of the best parts about helping where I could within my limited capacity, was seeing the aesthetic and the idea of Aethos coming to life. I was talking to a Graphic Design major and they said that “good graphic design makes a company” and I could not feel that more than when I saw some of the posters come together.

There was a real surge of drive instilled within me to make this work and make it work well once I saw our logo, name, and oh so corporate monochromatic colours come together. At the time it gave a much more coherent feel to what we were building narrative-wise, and continued feedback, especially on Open Studio night, maintained that feeling that what we had formulated as a group, and what Max had sold to the public with flyers and posters was very much the narrative we wanted.

I remember at the beginning of the project feeling as though the graphic design element was going to be very low priority and imagined that when we got to our inevitable crunch point that it might even be scrapped. This was a mindset that only changed as I started to realise how it would come together, and the important role that it would play. I felt that we may have benefitted from some more user testing of the logos and name to get a better sense of what was really showing what we were going for, and in future projects, I intend to put a bit more time into this type of information gathering when creating logos and aesthetics. In order to be able to get a message across, especially in the limited time we have in Open Studio, a lot of groundwork has to be done before you even open your mouth at your installation. The opening conversation is between the viewer and the work itself as they are stepping up. While we were not able to have this be the case with the work itself at Open Studio, we were able to achieve that somewhat with the posters Max had created that were in the foyer, especially since it featured Stuart’s “Ratman” character with black tape over his eyes.

The logo designed by myself and Max in the door to the room

The posters in the foyer designed and edited by Max