Post Mortem

Fall Semester 2020

CloudWorks is a pitch team composed of one artist, Cara Chen, one UI/UX designer, Annie Hsiao-Ching Huang, one experience designer, Beck Wolfinger, one producer, Jack McClain, and two programmers, Jim Liu and Alan Zhang. 

Our project began as a student pitch project back before we switched to fully remote work, and the project we pitched was very different from the one we ended up creating. The initial pitch that we were proposing was for an installation designed for the PTC’s main lobby space, but as the world turned on its head, and the logic of a physical installation at the time of a global pandemic rapidly melted away beneath us, we had to pivot. Over the summer we met and pivoted our project to instead focus on reimagining and redesigning the ETC’s typical in-person fall festival to a remote presentation format. The deliverables for this project are three primary pieces: a public-facing festival website that hosts information about the students, their work, the ETC, and access to the virtual festival; a public viewable live stream on Youtube of the festival that showcases work from BVW, Visual Storytelling, and semester-long projects; and finally the MMO-style virtual festival experience that allows guests to move around a 2.5D space, chat with one another through voice and text, download and launch BVW projects, view videos, leave comments for teams, and jump into Zoom calls to learn more about and experience the work.

Because of the very real deliverables and hard deliverable date at the end of this project and the integration of many guests external to the immediate ETC family, we spent a great deal of time focused on playtesting our virtual festival experience to ensure that it was easy to navigate for guests and would accurately capture the atmosphere of the traditional festival despite its new format. Starting around week 6 we began to hold external playtests every week to week and a half. These playtests, alternating between stress and experience testing helped to push our project into new places and make decisions about what to do. Aside from helping to streamline our experience for naive guests, these playtests also illuminated critical points in our networking design that helped us to realize how to lay out the space in a more stable and reliable manner.

One of the early goals of our project was not to directly recreate the festival as it used to be, but to accurately capture the atmosphere of the original experience. We loved the sense of controlled chaos and guest agency in choosing what to see when. Another thing we heard frequently in our research was the desire for ‘stairwell encounters’–unplanned conversations with old friends and colleagues. 

The core features of the virtual festival are meant to support these fantasies, and we’ve seen a lot of success in our playtests in capturing that feeling of running into a friend by populating the virtual spaces with chat booths to allow groups of guests to hop in and have an unexpected conversation. Additionally we added in a private calling feature to allow guests to talk to one another while walking around the space, which gives them the ability to make a plan of what to see and make their way there together. By giving each BVW project represented in the festival a ‘room’ to decorate and guests the option to choose what they see and when, we’ve accommodated for the freedom of movement that we’ve come to prefer over a more regimented conference style presentation with a specified schedule. The experience of the festival will change organically in real time as guests move around the space.

When we set our global vision of what we wanted the festival to be this year, we knew that we were setting our sights high. We had a lot that we wanted to accomplish and while the basic format of the festival stayed roughly consistent, it took us some time to find the appropriate schedule for the event that would ride the line between asking too much and not giving enough. Consistent with this trouble with the festival schedule was our own internal schedule. We were prepared this semester to be working remotely after the shake up from the previous semester. Typically as a team we tried to minimize the amount of necessary hours spent on video calls as much as possible, considering how much of our project was focused on designing to avoid ‘Zoom fatigue’. While this helped to prevent burnout early on, it worked to our detriment at times to not have consistent, very short meetings just to touch base with one another to keep up to date with what everyone was working on and what decisions were being made. From a production standpoint, we did not have the global organization in place to keep track of all of our necessary tasks to help us prioritize early enough. Once that was ready the project and our tasks became much clearer, but establishing that system earlier would have been far more effective. It would have helped to make clear to us what was and wasn’t getting the love that it needed. For example, while the livestream is an important part of the festival deliverables, it was never able to get the same attention that the virtual festival received. While both were must haves for the experience, the number of things that seemed of highest priority in the day to day moments through the semester were in relation to the virtual festival, so the stream continued to sit on the back burner. 

Throughout the course of this project we learned so much about how to design for remote experiences, a skill set that is important now more than ever. We made small steps to figuring out ways in which to overcome the hurdle that all suddenly remote events are now having to face as they are adapting on incredibly short timelines. We’re living in a time when people are more disconnected from each other physically than ever, and we learned how to recapture some of the magic associated with in-person gatherings. We also learned about the importance and powerful impact of delegation. This festival would not be possible in the form it has now without the help of over a dozen ambitious first and second year students who volunteered their time to help create sound and art assets, and manage and produce the event itself. CloudWorks was limited by having only six individuals officially working on the festival, but we learned how we could best improve the quality of the experience by relying on people external to the team who wanted to help out, and how to organize and run those subcommittees that submitted extra work to us.

Ultimately we are all incredibly proud of the experience that we have created and so enthusiastic with the results we’ve seen from early playtesting. Pulling this festival together was a massive effort and wasn’t without its challenges and pitfalls throughout, but through those difficulties, the six of us have learned so much that we will carry forward into our future projects, co-ops, or careers. And on one personal, emotional note, while any team could have been tasked with putting together a replacement festival, only the individuals I’ve worked with through this semester could put the amount of love, dedication, and fun into the process as I’ve experienced, and I’m so thankful for all of them.

Finally, we’d like to thank the ETC for approving this pitch project, way back when it was something completely different, and allowing us to have control over an event that is core to the ETC experience. We’ve connected more with the extended ETC family than ever through this project, and we’re grateful for the opportunity.

We talked with John Dessler as a stakeholder of the festival as an instructor of Visual Storytelling. We wanted to get a sense of his expectations for how Visual Storytelling student work should be shown in addition to his explanation of what exactly we would have to use was very helpful. We know now that we have 1-2 traditional film projects for each team and one interactive or non-linear project to work with. 

We are thinking now of holding the traditional video projects in an accessible repository and featuring the interactive work in the interactive portion of the festival on the last day. There are also the ‘vizzie awards’ that normally are given out at the end of the semester that could be given out live around the same time as the penguin award. Moving these to the live-broadcasted portion adds an element of fun and surprise for everyone.

On mentioning the last day of the festival, that brings us to a proposed change in schedule, shortening it down to three days instead of five. By condensing it down, we hope to make each day more impactful and more interactive by funneling more people into fewer days and lightening the load on both students and guests.

Opening on Friday with comments from Drew, ETC projects and Visual Story projects will be featured mainly on Friday and the beginning of Saturday. BVW Worlds will be highlighted through all of Saturday and Sunday. We also hope for a few special series sprinkled throughout at the end of each day. These could potentially be a speech from a notable alum or social functions meant to be an after party exclusive to students and alumni. 

One thing that we want to emphasize is the importance of sending out something physical in advance of the festival to guests who have RSVP’d. This will not only serve as a reminder to them about the event, weeks in advance, it is also an opportunity to give them a physical object that connects somehow to the digital event. Anything that we can do to make people feel more connected to one another in a remote context is incredibly valuable.

Our tech team met with Dave to go over possible solutions for our multiplayer server. Right now we were weighing the pros and cons of PUN2, Photon and uMMORPG against each other. PUN2 has the advantages of ease of use and development, but limits the number of concurrent players per room to only 32. uMMORPG is the other top contender, as it offers up to 500 players per room, but it maybe more difficult to work with. 

At the end of the week we got two new prototypes up and running that include adjacent voice chat functionality and streamlines text chat. Those can be found here to try out, but may be updated as time goes on.

1. Streamlined text chat
2. Adjacent voice chat

From an art perspective we are pursuing 2D pixel art avatar designs in a 3D space. The choice of 2D character art was made to support our artists is producing enough unique content to suit to large audience of guests that will be participating in the show. 

As the week draws to a close, we are preparing for ¼’s presentations next week, during which will be talking about our work for the first time with the broader faculty base and getting a chance to ask them questions.

Engagement for us means that we want attendees to be connected to both the work shown and the ETC students themselves. We want them to have a full, well-rounded experience, despite the online format, and stay accessible to all ages of guests.

Interaction implies that guests should be able to interact directly with the student work and talk with or ask questions of the students in real time. They should have an experience beyond that of just watching a lecture.

With camaraderie, it may be easy to think this is about allowing for networking opportunities between students and industry professionals or alumni, but we are targeting something softer. While there is the opportunity for networking at festival usually, the most important connections for people were the more interpersonal, passive interactions between old and new friends. ETC students should feel a sense of ownership of their work and belonging within the larger community.

First Proposal

What we are looking to create with festival now is a five day event, spreading the traditional experience across a week. This is done primarily to avoid issues related to ‘Zoom fatigue’. Many of our guests are likely taking and making video calls through their work week and the last thing we want to do it pile on 4+ hours of video conferencing at the end of their week.

Each day will feature different programming to show off different project work. Tuesday would feature the opening ceremonies and introductions to the project work from faculty and staff. The following four days would be a series of live broadcasts at two or more different times to accommodate time zone separation. 

With the broadcast portion concluding on Friday night, a special invite only interactive virtual festival would happen on Saturday. This would take the form of a lobby modeled after the ETC with chat functionality. From these lobbies, guests will be able to move from room to room, viewing streams of the work and getting a chance to play or interact with the work themselves. From here they can jump into a video call with the team for Q&A after, and then back to the main lobby.

First Playtests

At the end of this week we held some informal playtests. The first was in Rec Room, a VR/mobile game creation system. The team and a few of our friends from other projects joined a private room to begin to experiment with navigation within the existing platform. We found from this the importance of adjacency focused voice chat and streamlining of a feature set. For a platform that will be used for the very first time the night of, a guest should be able to quickly and easily navigate its interface.

We also put together our first tech prototypes for functionality of text chat, animation, and springboarding from one application to another. These foundational features will be major parts of our ultimate proposed plan for the interactive portion of festival. Chat functionality is so important for capturing those moments of passive socialization. And ensuring that guests may navigate through from a ‘project room’ to a teams actual project is core to our desire to allow them to actually play the experiences.

Our tech team identified several plug-ins for Unity to allow for voice and video chat functions as well as support for live Twitch streaming within the application. With these plug-ins our plan is to continue to develop these prototypes.

Next Week’s Agenda:

Next week we will be looking to continue to develop the prototypes by including voice and text chat functions. We also plan to identify more specifically what our technical restrictions are. Also on the docket are the playtest to explore workshop and several meetings with faculty to guide our process.

Hello, and welcome to a new semester! We are the project team CloudWorks and our responsibility for this semester is to redesign and redevelop the traditional ETC Fall Festival to a remote, virtual format.

The ETC Fall Festival typically occurs in the first half of December and serves as a chance to highlight the work done throughout the course of the semester. While the first immersion semester course, Building Virtual Worlds, is a major element of that work that gets shown, first-year work from Visual Storytelling and second-year work from semester-long projects gets displayed.

The in-person festival usually sees guest lists of about 300-400 individuals and accommodating this many people remotely is a major challenge of ours. Among our other project goals include:

1. Developing a solution beyond a livestreamed lecture
2. Allowing attendees to play/interact with the actual projects
3. Creating a space to allow for passive socialization

First week’s tasks:

This week we did research into both existing solutions for remote conferences and event planning and possible avenues for our own created technologies. While much of this research was incredibly helpful for understanding what has been done, it has helped to define the festival for us along more specific lines. The festival is not a conference. The festival is a celebration of student work. Its the culmination of several months of hard work, not a series of lectures about a specific topic. The remote conference tools are helpful for giving context into the space, but they are not the ultimate direction that we wish to go in. From a technological perspective we began looking into plug-ins for Unity that would allow for voice and video chat, as well as streaming integration.

We also sent out surveys about the festival to first-year students, second-year students, alumni, and faculty. These surveys were designed to get information about what expectations of the festival typically were and what each group felt were the most important parts of the in-person festival that we should be trying to capture in a remote format.

There’s also the question of settling on our team roles, core hours, advisor meetings, and team name, which we got through this week.

Next week’s agenda

Next week our goals are to go through our survey responses, talk with faculty and external resources about remote event planning, and experiment with our first chat-oriented prototypes.