Category: Uncategorized

Home Portfolio ENSO Interactive Story With Charisma Home PortfolioOpen menu ENSO Interactive Story With Charisma Menu Linkedin Instagram Github Itch-io UnityCreative Core Brief I was always enthusiastic about learning to work with game development tools. Although nowadays the Unity Engine is far more than a game development engine, I was interested in game development when I first started learning to work with it. Learn.unity.com provides a variety of learning paths, I decided to learn its Creative Core, because there were a lot of great projects in this module, which got my attention. Also, it was more in line with my studies at the time, which was MA in animation. Shaders I created different shaders for different materials. I have also animated flags and fluid like surfaces using shaders. The video demosntrates some of the final products of this process. http://shakibomrani.ir/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Flag_Shader_003_720.mp4 Still Life Composition Another one of my submissions for shaders assignments. The green cylinder in the middle is supposed to be my flask. Lighting Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut elit tellus, luctus nec ullamcorper mattis, pulvinar dapibus leo. Get ENSO from here: Itch.io

Home Portfolio ENSO Interactive Story With Charisma Home PortfolioOpen menu ENSO Interactive Story With Charisma Menu Linkedin Instagram Github Itch-io Interactive Story With Charisma Brief From the moment I started my first semester as an Animation graduate student, I wanted to make my screenplays interactive. It was not the focus of the courses at the university, so I decided to make this happen on my own. Project Timeline 2021 BeginningThe Idea Choosing The Play & The Platform I had a friend who was a graduate Art Studies student back then. She had a thing for dramatic literature. Therefore, we decided to work on this project together. We searched the internet for a better understanding of interactive narrative. We found ways to implement it ourselves, and Charisma.ai was the most interesting. We both had read the “Mime for One” play back then. It is simple and yet has no dialogue. It is also full of actions, while the main character is passive. Charisma.aiImplementination Making The Act Without Words Interactive We started the project in September 2021. The implementation of the story in the Charisma platform ended on October 2022. Although the learning materials for Charisma.ai was straightforward and accessible, implementing the story had its own challenges. One of the most significant challenges we faced was creating decision points for users with similar words and different meanings. For example, the player must decide whether to “go to the sound” or “don’t go to the sound”. Although these two sentences contradict each other, they have many similar parts, for example, the verb of both is from the infinitive form of “going” and if only the infinitive of “going”, which is “to go”, is considered by the authors as the possible player input, then Charisma possibly will not show a correct reaction and follows the story from the opposite direction of the player’s desired path. Therefore, we needed to hardcode many of these contradictions, which made the system less intelligent and more expert. Documenting The ProcessAn Online Survey Observing How Users Interact With Our Story We wrote a yet-to-be-published paper to document our experimentation with this platform. We decided to perform a case study to see how the users react to their experience. Our test cases had read the play before interacting with the interactive version of it. Then we gave them access to our interactive story. After interacting with the story, they needed to provide feedback in an online questionnaire. http://shakibomrani.ir/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Charisma-interaction_1.mp4 Interaction Footage This is a screen record of the mobile story interaction experience. Our test cases mostly interacted with the mobile version of the story. Surely, everyone has a different experience by making different decisions throughout the story.

Home Portfolio ENSO Interactive Story With Charisma Home PortfolioOpen menu ENSO Interactive Story With Charisma Menu Linkedin Instagram Github Itch-io ENSO Brief This was my first game jam experience. I was an art director in this project. But as for many small teams, I needed to wear other hats and have additional responsibilities. The proposed theme of the game jam: “Smack the measures in the head and start the change. Make the dimensions of the universe fit your mind.” Project Timeline 2022 BeginningMoodboard Brain Storming and Moodboard I participated in brainstorming sessions with the team to find the best idea concerning the theme. We decided to base our game on the Enso meditation ritual. It derives from the Zen school of thought. When we made this decision, we distributed the workload between team members. I created a mood board for artists and developers to make them comprehend how the game feels. Early designUI & Wireframes Designing The User Interface & Wireframes Then we had design sessions with the designer and developers. I had some design ideas because I had learned game design on online platforms as a priori. We chose a high-score system design for the game, and the player had to control a cherry blossom inside an Enso sign. Meanwhile, the players must have avoided hitting the borders of the Enso by controlling the size and the movement direction of the cherry blossom. As a result, the whole team began testing their ideas, and we started the prototyping phase. I designed the start page with one of our other artists. I am responsible for the logotype design on this page. I also prepared wireframes for the development team. In these wireframes, I tried to demonstrate the user interaction flow in the game and decided how many pages the game needed. I created these wireframes using Balsamiq. After we all agreed on the player’s interaction flow, I designed icons and background assets and chose font styles for different pages. Level DesignProps & Levels Helping The Designer & The Developer Meanwhile, I was helping the development team to figure out how the levels work. For this purpose, I collaborated with one of the artists to develop the levels visually and lent a hand to the developer to help him understand the props and the level’s difficulty better. I illustrated my conceptual vision for the level design and prop design, then handed these designs to artists and developers for further development. Putting these props together inside an Enso will result in different levels with different difficulties. We also have decided to build a speed mode for the game called Zen mode. In this mode, the player will not face any challenging obstacles for a short period. Wrapping UpGDD Writing the Game Design Document (GDD) I created a design document at this phase, then handed it, alongside these illustrations, to the development and art team. You can see the result in the image above. This image is taken from the inside of the game. Get ENSO from here: Itch.io