I just realized I haven’t added my last annotations here. I have been busy preparing the Cook Your Way game for the alt.ctrl.GDC exhibition, so I haven’t advanced much on the Shellphone project yet. I have read a few articles and found some technical libraries that can be helpful, but I’ll sketch it out on a new post.

Implementing animations

Continuing the work from the previous work session, I have configured the animations on Unity.

  • what do I think about them?
  • did they communciate well what was intended?

On casing

Checked different options for materials, beeswax to 3D printing. I went to the Digital fabrication lab and consulted with the technician about different options. One of the more interesting was resin printing, which creates a nice translucent object. Below is a photo of their example object. Based on this, I created a 3D model of a shell-shaped case in Sketchup. However, when I brought the model for printing, the technician told me that it had quite a few issues in how it was constructed. Specifically that test printing in resin could be expensive and time-consuming. From this point, we discussed other ways of fabricating the case. The more interesting one is printing as one layer of filament in a PLA printer. This creates a very thin and somewhat fragile object, but it is quite translucent and has a resistance that is a bit organic, kind of similar to a fungi or tree bark texture. I’ve decided to to a round of printing based on this technique. I’m planning on doing it sometime in the next few weeks.