This Week Was All About, uh. Planning.
I was supposed to finish all of my planning, including concept art, in Week 2 per my personal plan, but that ended up not working out. I spent a lot of time helping my teammate look for good speech recognition APIs. My role was to source all sorts of options for them to try, including Wit.AI, DialogFlow, Microsoft’s LUIS and Cognitive Services, and some tools from the Unity asset store. Some of systems didn’t work out too well, but at least they got Cognitive Services and Azure working. 😀 I’m excited!
But First, Technical Issue Resolved:
In my previous post, I mentioned that I couldn’t get Unity to recognize my Quest 2 via the Oculus Link. Turns out the issue is actually my old GPU, an Intel Iris Pro Graphics 6200. I have a late 2015 iMac — I used to work at San Francisco’s Apple Genius Bar (now the Genius Grove at Union Square) as a Technical Specialist, so I was able to get what was pretty top of the line at the time at a bigger employee discount before I left.
It still works, so why get rid of it? … I had the same line of thought with my phone. I jumped from an iPhone 6 to an iPhone 12 Pro thanks to an internship stipend and a need to run competitor XR apps on it.
Tasks Accomplished: Week 3
| Technical Tasks | Art Tasks |
| Sourced different speech recognition systems for my teammate to try | Produced designs for secondary characters — these are the ones the player will talk to |
| Worked to try and get Wit.AI to work for us (it did not) | Made some environment concept art |
| Sourced tutorials for NPC random pathing AI (point based & randomly changing transforms) | Discussed possibility of custom songs with a game music composer |
| Drew for UX & UI of menus and windows | |
| Found open source environment and prop assets |
Design is Very Importantâ„¢
I can’t stress this enough, and I feel like a lot of hardcore programmers miss this (at least a good chunk of the new generation of SWEs I’ve met are like this), and a project is created without any appeal. It’s just a mass of code that does something cool, but not something necessarily in a state useful to consumers. Yet they think it is.
I don’t want our project to end up like this, so I took a lot of time to help us conceptualize the final product through art. Drawing what we’re thinking of is also good for pointing out issues that arise before production begins: thinks like sensitivity issues, usability issues, etc.
Without further ado:
Will draw more to finish that up — until next time~
Ryan Davis
