Following my previous post, we progressed more to make the vr environment more immersive and aesthetically pleasing.
The vr environment now looks more realistic and complete with the addition of these assets:
- rocks of different size and shape
- island terrain
- water surrounding island
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When we were play-testing our prototype last time, we noticed how people were throwing away the rocks into the water (of course they’d do this…). Several solutions were proposed, such as making ripple effects or making the rocks bounce back at the player if thrown too far. We decided to add trails to the stars as they move so players can feel free to “draw and paint” on a blank canvas in the sky.
We achieved this by adding a particle system to each star. We then tested it out on game view, trying out different features to decide on the best effect. Here’s a video of what it first looked like:
As you can see in the footage, the trail at first looked like little blobs multiplying over time. To make it look more appealing, we made the following changes:
- color: turn from yellow to white
- opacity: fade out slowly over time
- speed: create a total of x number of particles at a rate of y each time.
We also edited the code of the rock-star movement so that the z value of the star is being multiplied by a number, making it move not directly above the rock (on the same axis), but a little bit to the side. This resulted in the star moving
We then proceeded to add music in the background. This contributed a lot to make the experience more mysterious and adventurous. Here’s a video of Max play-testing it:
There were also a few bugs here and there which we fixed, such as how some of the stars weren’t corresponding correctly to the rocks’ movements (being stuck within one area) and some stars not having the right trails.
More thing to work on:
- adding texture to the moon
- the final scene when all rocks/pebbles have been used up
- sound