Bowhead is live! - Project in the museum!

Today was the day! From the 11th of March until the 16th, our installation is installed in Hull Maritime Museum!

We threw all of our energy and resources into this project, and I'm thrilled to see it pay off! Today our first users came in, and they all left with a smile, so in a way that's our goal achieved. The Leap Motion seems to have been intuitive enough for people use, and people seemed to understand the game mechanics pretty much right off the bat. The stand for the Leap Motion seems to draw people towards it better than at Digital Dystopias, where a lot of users would look around for the sensor or think it's a touchpad.

Today Ash and I went to the maritime to fix an issue where the Mac would come out of fullscreen in the game. We got around it with a script Ash wrote beforehand- the trade-off being that it requires one mouse click when the machine is first started.

We also raised the volume of the harpoon and chain sounds which are handled in Unity, and trimmed some of the bloat in the project by trying different lighting settings, minimising the particle effects in the game, and also cleaning up some of my many print messages which had snuck through in the last build.

Somewhat bewilderingly, the graphics card in this particular Mac is known to not function with Unity, leading to the game running without a graphics card! All things considered, I think the frame rate isn't bad. We were able to get away with a lot of optimisation as a result of the screen we are using having a relatively low resolution, but we are pretty satisfied with the final build.

There might be a write-up at the end of the run in the museum, just picking apart the project as a whole, but this is me signing off for now at least!

Adam