Kawia's Adventure

Tabi shares her closing thoughts with us on the Sony Talent League experience.

Lydia shares her candid closing thoughts with us on the mentorship experience.

We're already at the end of week 10?! Time to bring it all together.

Lydia:
Ooooooh thats a good question, well... Over the course of these ten weeks my system was slowly imbued by the power of Ergokinesis! the power to control all forms of energy with the mind, this ability is however limited to myself and depends on how much caffeine is in my system at the time and whether or not music is being played. 

Pros:

• Allows the user to complete large tasks
• Makes people around the user happy
• Limitless energy supply
• Easier to learn new skills due to enthusiasm! (jack of all trades)

Cons

• Users will experience blips of 'No thoughts/head empty' scenarios
• User paces a lot, like A LOT (I am told I look like a squirrel because I pace with my hands up like a squirrel...) 

With this super power it becomes easy to match people and interact with them. Talking to people isn't as scary as it once was and now as I face the horizon, the world is not as scary as I thought it once was, it's as fun as I make it!

The other thing I consider a superpower is my weird talent of hissing like a Puff Adder, a kind of viper around here, but it freaks people out and Tabi says mammals should not do that. Personally I think I sound like a cat when that happens and consider it a fun party trick, no one else does though.

Tabi:
I have come to realize I have the mind bending ability😂 to stay calm under pressure, which I know is a real cliché thing to say, but, when things start to get crazy around me, it's as if a different me kicks and I kind of black out, while Tabi 2.0 starts doing all the things that need to get done in a very orderly way. It's kind of like turning into a robot and I don't stop until everything is cleared out, then, I, the original laid back Tabi returns and looks in awe at everything that's been completed. Also, I think I can communicate with chicken😂. I'll just leave that there.

Time for the drum rolls!
🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁

DELIVERY!

It's the last week and we've cooked up something pretty good (or at least we think so). Now it's time to 'keep the fire burning' and deliver something awesome that best depicts our project. The curtains are about to close and it's a bittersweet feeling, part of us wishes it could go on forever, half of us is screaming for a snack, and somewhere another bit is just a happy to have built, learned and grown as much as we have. Now it's time to serve it up!

It's a daunting feeling but you have to be willing to put yourself out there for anything to work out. It feels like staring down a lion, some of the time if you don't show fear it'll leave you alone, (other times you WILL BE EATEN and I strongly advise no one try to walk up to an apex predator and say hi!) ,but we've built it up and we're about to shoot the last video, so we shall deliver something spectacular!

We love you guys!
🌼🌸Lydia and Tabi

Finalizing the prototype, thinking back on all we've learned, and honing our pitch with the help of Phil Lord and Vani (Saraswathi Balgam), it was an emotional and intense week! We can't believe the mentorship is nearly over, but we're excited to share our pitch with you next week!

Lydia and Tabi go outside to give us a glimpse of their neighbourhood.

Musical instruments, storytelling advancements, and 70% done!

Tabi:

hmmmmm,, let's see...trying to narrow down by imagining myself going on a year long roadtrip without the chance of human interaction, hmmmm. 

MUSIC! I don't think I can define enough how vital my music is to my existence and the best part is my ears can listen to practically anything so my playlists are insane. One minute I could be listening French soul pop, the next I'm listening to Kenyan gengetone. 

Two! I've battled between salt and vinegar chips and the sun😂 the mind is a mysterious place. But I'm gonna go with the sun, which is something I had never even thought of before, until I backed up and thought to myself how much I love watching sunrise and sunsets. I guess we could even say they are my favorite parts of living, getting to watch that orangey ball of burning air come up in the sky and going down.

Lydia:

Now this is a tough one, so i'll follow Tabi's roadtrip trail, if I was on the road for a year... wait that's quite a lot so lets segment this a little: if I was on the road for a year during the zombie apocalypse trying to get to a safe haven I would bring my Makeup collection. Yes, I know it sounds extremely vain to want to look great as a zombie, but I firmly believe that no matter how bad or scary things get, if you look good, or put in some effort, it goes a long way in building up your confidence to take on the zombie horde. Also, it weighs about 5kgs so it would make for a great close range weapon and the mirrors can be used for short distance surveillance and signaling, and the brushes can be sharpened to shanks, and it's still and excuse to do art on the run - the possibilities are endless!!!

Now if it was a pleasant road trip, you know the kind that you bring a ukulele to, I would have gone with water and my cat Gin, he means the world to me. We'd listen to Upsahl and Chelou in my busted van and chugging good ol' H20! 

Yep that's everything I can't live without: water, my makeup bag and a lazy cutie cat named Gin.

We made up a song! Which was a lot of fun to do :)

You can listen here!

Lydia:

We had some instruments lying around: a flute, guitar and some old woven containers that can be used as drums and I used them to figure out Ayub Ogada's chords in Koth Biro. I can't read music but I have an okay pair of ears ;) Since the chord progression had the mood and feel we wanted and is easily layered, after some alterations we stacked some rhythms onto each other with the help of Joseph, a friend who has better understanding of music than we do, done via a WhatsApp call (all hail tech technology!).

Lastly we added some savannah ambience for that extra kick and we had a theme! It was super fun dusting off the old music hat. I got to create something in a completely different medium so I feel like I've grown a little as an artist.

Drumroll for the goal of the week.....aptly named: Nasema? (What am I saying?)

Our goal this week is to figure out how to properly express exactly what we are doing. Just getting the right words that best explain who we are, what we've made, and why we are doing this. Talking to ourselves in the mirror till we know our words by heart and just having a blast yammering about the land the lovely ladies pictured above came from (fun fact they are modelled after our friends. Left to right: Liwe is Tabby, Nemo is Nimu and Siki is Gladys), what we stand for, what our Imaginary friends stand for, what this project stands for and mostly importantly what we're going to say.

Words have the power to create belief and we're gonna make the tribe believe in this project just as much as we do.

(Also on this week's list: draw up new cover art and fix Kawia's fight sequence, and the trees in the environment are kinda ugly so we need to get a better lighting scheme...but that's more of a technical thing so... not as important, I mean it is but...not in this scenario... right, yeah, yep that's right)

And lastly, what's the image above? A selfie with my favourite girls - they've worked so hard for us!

Yep that's everything!

Blocking complete and it's off to the render farm! Plus lessons learned in not having to be an expert in all areas, remember to water your plants, and more!

Onward, to the farm!

With the static scenes nearly being done and the cleanup well underway we now move on to sending them off to render farms to be rendered! yay!!!!!!! ugh it's been such a trip getting here but with this the prototype is (checks notes) 33% complete! Now we must dial up the pizza delivery service of 3D renders and order in! 

But we're so happy to even get here! This art of development was key in developing Kawia's look, defining her story and spending an embarrassing amount of time making a lion shake its butt (in our defense it was hilarious). But it was necessary in making this a storybook you can walk into, now we must wear our zombie fighting gear and unleash the horde of the undead upon the game land! 

Now you might have a lot of questions:

1. Why static shots instead of in-engine renders?
2. what did you do to that lion?
3. ...I don't know what else, but if you want to ask, feel free to ask!

Well static shots have more control over choreography and physics simulation and let us go crazy on visual effects and as for the lion well... it was pretty funny that's all i can say hehehe! 

(no lions were harmed in the making of this game)

Kusonga mbele sana! We've "moved forward a lot" this week! Have a listen to hear more :) 

This week's goal is a technical one: making the user experience as intuitive as possible that way they won't be lost with the shifts in perspective. So it's time to experiment with everything from camera angles, shifts, cuts and edits, oh my!

Off to the lab we go!

Yikes, putting stuff out there is scary! But we did it and we're feeling good about it!

Curious what our game is going to be like? This is team Eurydice's game test #1! After binge-watching a lot of Netflix interactive films to better see how they would play out in a game, we decided to render out a scene to at least see if it would work. It did! (after a lot of trials) and we were happy with the results despite Kawia becoming cross eyed in the process (LMAO that will be fixed in the final prototype). But it gives a good impression of what we're going for: an experience where one has direct impact/influence on the story and actions of the characters. Stay tuned for the next bit!

Go-to song/type of music for inspiration? And/or: What are the first three songs on your playlist?

Tabi:
After so much thought because my playlist together with my music app were deleted from my country, hahahaha, I've been going through all my extremely multi faceted playlists on youtube and I picked these three:

Benzema ft Savara - Bypass
Marc Rebillet - One More Time
KDDO ft Nyovest - ewallet

Lydia:
This is easy (sorry Tabs!), I listen to everything with my favourite genres being heavy metal, electronic music and show tunes but these are my all time faves:

Nina Chuba - Jungle 
Droeloe - Push Through
Good Omens theme song

Yep that's it, we have extremely different tastes but we still love hanging out together, besides half of the time we end up really liking what the other recommends. The other half is usually just an awkward experience as we try to explain that it's not for me but you do you sis.

Our goal this week is to add a learning aspect to the game (credit to Aish and Pedro from the stl discord chats) who helped us format a simple learning mechanic for the game: when you defeat a spirit in the game, you get a snippet of history. Short and sweet, a fairly simple additional that adds a lot to the game! And best of all it's not that hard to do, the tribe is brilliant! 

So that's what we'll add this week, yay! Hope you are well  and I hope you have an awesometacular week!

It's time we tell you a bit more about the project and where we're at in development!