Description: Fire Planet is an experience/game that takes place on a planet engulfed by never-ending fires. In order to ensure the security of this mysterious civilization on this planet, a dome has been erected surrounding their city as well as powerful water sprinklers to fight off the constantly encroaching fires. The user assumes the role of a protector of the planet, using their mysterious magical powers to shoot projectiles that kill the planet’s flames. In this scenario, one of the sprinklers malfunctioned, causing the fires to move towards the dome. The user is tasked with putting out the fires and reaching the broken sprinkler to fix it and ensure the security of the city.
Brainstorming: We started brainstorming by discussing what everyday actions would be interesting to replicate in VR in an alternate reality. We discussed ideas such as picking up trash, throwing balls and we eventually settled on designing an experience around the action of using a hand fan. This would entail swinging the VR controller from left to right or up and down. From this, we came to the concept of using a powerful hand fan to blow away or put out fires.
This is a character from the anime Naruto who swings a powerful fan
Because using a hand fan powerful enough to put out large fires was an idea that is something that is not realistic, we created a concept revolving around firefighting in an alternate scenario. We decided to create a narrative of a civilization on another planet constantly threatened by approaching fires.
Due to the changes we had to make for the project, we decided to simplify the project from waving a fan, which we believed would not be as compelling of an experience with a mouse, keyboard and computer screen, to simply aiming and throwing orbs of particles that would put out the fires. Because of the disconnect between the motion of throwing or aiming and using a keyboard/mouse to do this, we found it hard to really make the action intuitive besides from most people’s engrained experiences of using a mouse and a keyboard to play video games. But in this alternate scenario, the action of pushing the hand forward mimics that of throwing something, and we found it vital to add this animation of the hands to the experience.
Process: We divided the work with me doing the scene design and character animation, Will with particle interactions and Mari with the projectiles. We worked together to bring all of our parts together to finish the project.
For the scene design we all had a desolate planet in mind with no vegetation. From this I decided to make the environment dark and the terrain rocky and dark. I designed the city in the background with a sphere with a transparent material and used some building assets along with some bright lights to have it contrast the desolate environment that the user is standing in. I also added a red spotlight from that emitted from the base of the dome to make the environment red in order to add some urgency to the actions required of the user.
Animating the hands was something that we believed had to be done so that the experience so that the user would feel like they are the firefighter. I initially started experimenting with models from Mixamo but found these difficult to control and I could not figure out how to remove certain parts of the avatar so that it would not obstruct the camera’s main focus on the hands. With Sarah’s advice, I was able to find a way to use the VR hands. I was able to figure out how to add simple animations (point, closed fist, open hand) to the VR hands. I also felt like the default skin of the hands fit nicely, with red and black gloves resembling the outfits that a sci-fi game character would use.
Lastly, I worked on creating the orb that would be shot at the fires. For this, I created a simple particle system using Unity’s Visual Effects Graph and attached this to the projectile game object that Mari made.
To tie this all together, we added a voiceover to greet the user and provide some context for the experience, as well as a closing voiceover when the user completes the task. We also played around with how we could best guide the user towards the sprinkler they needed to fix. We did this by adding a semi-transparent blue cylinder with the sprinkler inside. We also added an animation for when the user would reach it, as the sprinkler springs up and jets of water begin shooting out of it to reaffirm that the user completed the task
Screenshots
Gameplay:
Reflections:
Overall I had a great time doing this project and I am happy with how it turned out. It was difficult to really mimic motions with the VR controllers to a mouse/keyboard experience, and I am happy that we still somewhat stuck with our initial concept because it was something that I really liked. I am happy with how our game design turned out and the cues and instructions we provided the user. Our positioning of the fires and the cylinder ahead of the player allowed us to make it intuitive that the user must go forward to complete some objective.
Agency Question:
I believe that we gave the user agency that compelled them to act in a certain way by giving them the ability to react to the environment, in this case, they have the complete ability to extinguish the fires. Because fire is something that evokes an immediate response of fear and danger, we believe that a user’s immediate reaction would be wanting to put out as many fires as quickly as possible. We spawned the user right next to the fires facing the objective so that their instinct, even without any cues from the voiceover, would be to put out the fires. Furthermore, we placed the fires they must put out in, more or less, a line towards the objective, extinguishing the fires until they reached the blue cylinder. Lastly, we wanted the final interaction of the user entering the cylinder to be a rewarding one, delaying the animation of the sprinkler turning on and the ending voiceover so that it is apparent that the user accomplished their job and successfully controlled the environment’s dangerous fires.