Visions of Gideon
In the last post. I did the shader for this psychedelic shader. So for now i am trying to end more interaction to this experience.
According to the script.
So in this term, the mechaic is just get the task and get to the window to open it . Then will hear the background sound lounder. And I did it with the triggerenter
Based on the interview and the research we made together, We designed several task to do in this experience.
And I am trying to write the script based on that.
I wrote in the first person way. We assume the player enter this story with the view of the main character “grandma”. But also for the story experience, I decide to let the voicc to became the Guide as well.
In this case , the voice will guide the user to go throught the whole experience. Because we don’t have much visual on the story so actually takes us quite long time to keep going through the whole experience.
Meanwhile I also working on the shade to the similar effects
At the first
I tried to do with one map but is not really close to what we really wanna.
And then I asked for help to Zans , he helped give anther solution.
Bacially is combined two maps together. And it worked pretty well.
In the past spring break we didn’t do anything new. So at the beginning this term we update the storyline once again.
We updated the idea of how the cross platform will work in this experience. In the new version. We use ar as an introduction of the backstory of our story. Then users will enter in the Vr experience of what do normal people think of visual impaired people would see, then they will turn into what blind people really see.
On the top of that, we’ve made research of how normal people see and also we interviewed a visual impaired people what’s the lfe be like with the help of one of the classmate, Cal.
Here’s some of the results.
And also the interview
This is the link https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hypIu10ftjWkbWUoOhoeSmOiJDd4142QnyXgP0IDp7I/edit
After the last Meeting. All I have to do to fix all the unity bugs and conduct all the things we had right now.
So at this point, we finished the most interactivity and also the animation in first scene and second scene, also with the start scene and the end credit scene.
I helped updated the Game Documents.
Let me quickly going through the whole experience.
First starts with the name and words’ version tutorial (if we have more time we will try to figure it out how to make a real tutorial)
Player will start as looking at their own feet and belly in order to help them understanding they become a seagull in this experience.
then the scene manager will take the player to the beach scene which will have the main storyline.
In this enviornment ,players can have the interaction with objects and mini-game.
Player can grab the objects including the speech bumble and even used the sticker to punch the seagull. We add the sound effects to it as well(it supposed to have animation that the seagull will hide from the stick but we haven’t finish it apologize 🙂 )
In fact, games are ideal for humor in many respects, because they involve their players in the act of comedy-making. This is reflected in the vr narrative as well. According to Ludonarrative comedy, there is a distinction between comedy and comedy gameplay. In other media, traditional comedy is focused on timing. Audience is passive to receive all the messages. Conversely, users will break the timing in gaming. “Play and narrative are not the one ”(G. Frassica,1999). Therefore the humor element is designed to be the mechanical basis of the gameplay in our experience, in terms of the characters, the game world, game mechanics, such as the player being able to steal fries, beat the protagonist with a stick, etc., and retain the comedy using a mostly narrative with some interactivities. This is a type of comedy that is specific to interactive entertainment: humor through mechanics. By designing gameplay mechanisms or activities meant to produce humorous tensions, this strategy includes the player in the “comedy-making” process.
And after that will go to the minigame part
We set the 20sec to this minigame and add the BGM to this part but I feel we might need to change the time set for better experience.
After that it’s the flying scene, player will stand on the other seagull’s back to doing the transitions.
We trying to shrink the things in the city scene but unfortunatly we don’t have much time to fix all the problems so we decide to take this part out at the final presentation, but we keep keep it on our game documents.
And here’s the final ending credits scene made by cal , I made some slight change to make it look better.
For now that’s all we have now.
Further step
since we all have the interest to finish this project, we decide to develop more about this project as we planned to.
Problems
We have this work routine of the VR experience . We first build the Environment and merge them together. Then working on the interactibvity seperately in different unity project to make sure there’s one working copy. After that we will do that in the unity.
But the problem is, I didn’t set up vr headset in every empty project (mainly because of we use different vr plug-in , but there’re some bugs will show up when I changed to camera to xr rig. I give the tag “player “to the camera and it only coillde with the camera will trigger the particle effect. But somehow it didn’t work with the Xr Rig.
And also the player is in the perspective of the bird .We actually changed the camera size that cause the value of all the objects in the world is not big (just looks big )because of the Mini Gane is about spawning ice cream on the cart. I used the Random.range to let it spawn in the randow position. In that case, the spawn position only can be the integar. Then the problem is it will never show in the right position because the cart is also small.
What’s more, this ice cream I used the asset in the all work project instead of import the fbx I used in my empty project. Which caused I didn’t know the item pivot has change a lot. It cause a lot trouble to me I was test the spawn position. I have to keep test the position.
Solution
There’s not much things we can do, but only size up the cart a bit and create the empty project of the prefeb to change the pivot and keep test it.
And for the destroy particle effect, I asked Zan to help to look at it . When we try the triggerenter instead of the collisionenter it works.
Finally it worked.
In this minigame, I think it will be easier to use the eventmanager but I wasn’t know until I write all the script based on the timer.
I will intergate at it later
Sound Effect
The last thing to finish this interactivity is to add the sound effect. We have this BGM for the mini game which require me to switch the background on triggerenter. And also I edited a bit of the eating icecream sound effect so that everytime I ated the ice cream will have the effect that particle explorsion and eating.
And the basic game construction is done!
In the past week ,Cal and me merged all the enviroment and start to do the interactivity .
Mini Game
I successfully did the mini game’s part.
The logic of this game shares the similiar way to achieve it. Like in the CVRPP, I did the mechanic of move left and right to avoid the obstacle. The obstacle will spawn automatically. And this minigame is also about grab as much ice cream as you can .
So I need to make the ice cream prefab and spawn first , once user use the ice cream to smash at camera , it will gain 10 points and have the effect to let user know they “eat ” the ice cream successfully.
We set the 20s countdown of this game, so it will have the timer at the corner. Because it only just some interaction part we wanna to have in this VR story so it will be like game can play as many as you can. It just played once and the score didn’t really matter to this minigame.
Just to make sure the ice cream only collide with camera will have the particle effect. Then I learnt It can have the tag of the camera as”player”.
Here’s the effect of this game.
I opened an empty project to test all the script and I used the blue cube to simulate the “head set”. Because I didn’t set up the xr rig in here to save some time but the logic is the same.
Also because the ice cream has the rigid body , I found it quite interesting when the ice cream spawn at the same position It coillde with each other and start to rotate –it quite funny to grab it ， like the ice cream doesn’t wanna you to grab hhh.
BUGS came out
When I finished the script ,we wanna try to it in the total scene but we met a lot of troubles.
First the controller didn’t work on my laptop. We even went to the CTL looking for help, even Alexsandro offered us a offcial cable of the quest 2 but still didn’t work.
Second the school computer version is too old to open our projects and if we try to find the technical support it takes really long time to do iy.
Third is somehow in the beach scene , my xr camera is shaking and jigging and the rate becames only around 20ish . It could be my laptop isn’t powerful enough to run the scene but I didn;t really believe since it’s a new gaming pc.
SOlUTION
Lin told me she has the same problem in last term, the way to resolve the controller is to apply for an app id in oculus and set it in unity which works ! And somehow the camera shaking problem is resolved .
And we also finished the script.
This week we meet the team member from sound art and finish the job of the buildin the enviorment.
We finally finalise the script and I change the scene based on the script.
Also meanwhile Cal finished the pier and city scene . We successfully merge all the scenes together.
There’s one most important factor to all the narrative, making the conflict. The conflict between the characters themselves and the environment, the conflict between different characters, and also the conflict between the original perception and the reality,..It not only reflects on the dialogue ,character design but also on the experience design. For example, a bird standing on top of another bird and flying, people will find it funny because there is a conflict with the original perception of birds Like in the transition scene I asked sound art students to create a romantic soundtrack and I added particle effects to make the bird flying through layers of clouds to create a stunt.
I used particle system to build the moving clouds
Meanwhile, we start to write the game documents and sound artist already offer some of the sound in the list.
On the top of that, we start to do the interactivity to embrace this experience. Cal did the teleport and replace the wings to the hands, and i am doing the spatial sound and the mini game.
Also the storyboard is finished https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVOTsXnB8=/?moveToWidget=3458764519106189622&cot=14
In the meeting we discussed about the bubble design, we all voted for this one.
And here’s the this week to do list.
On the lecture we talked about all the sound we need in this experience.
The main soundtrack we need in this experience reference to the spongebob
Here’s the link for the full presentation:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1gZ9qUEL1oEej7pThaNue4OTi4S8Y6YASoknhHYWXfb4/edit#slide=id.p
We organised all the things we have on the miro board . And got some feedback.
Presentation skill: make all the mechanic clear: like including what kind of interactivities.
Project: consider the mini game carefully (but also mainly cause we didn’t explain well about it actually connect to the plot).
Meanwhile, Lin finished the second version of the script.
Esme and Marianna was trying to rig the model of the character and finding more asset for the interactivity.
Also Cal and me are trying to figure out how to use the collaborator unity which actually took us 3 days to work it out( a bit handy to achieve). And meanwhile he will take care of the pier-beach part and I will do the city scene.
Here’s Cal’s part.
For my part,
I first thinking of the Sea of Solitude, continue the cartoon style but also have a bit asthetic vibe of the environment .
As you can see ,the original comic don’t have much description of the background ,but mainly focus on the animals. That actually gives us the space to creat a completely new scene. But also not too much but add the funny spice to the whole experience. I watched the Storks, a comedy carton movie also talking about birds and the Watched Which also inspired me how to do with the environment .
And then I find the asset to build the city scene
In the last post we have this really rough idea of this project so on the top of that we’re gonna develop it on the concept ,clear the concept, and even to the storyline.
Concept and design goal
On the one hand, we don’t wanna it be really offensive to disable people, meanwhile we wanna this project to help normal people to understand better about disable people’s life.
So I am planning to Invented a character but based on reasearch of how normal people imagine vision impaired people’s life and how disabled people describe what they feel about the ordinary life like how they feel about the objects how they feel about those daily routine of healthy people. Based on that , we will visualize the whole experience in VR.
But before that we still have a rough plan about the storyline.
And based on that we develop our questionary