PROJECT MEMBER: Luize, Nhi, and Tiger
PROJECT THEME: Apocalypse/Escape Room
IDEA DEVELOPMENT:
In our first meeting (via Zoom), we decided a few elements that we want to explicitly convey in our projects before brainstorming: 4 final project theme ideas (Apocalypse, Escape room, Wonderland, Create an interpretation of a city from Invisible cities), a fictional space, interactions, events, and the sense of storyness.
In the beginning, we thought of recreating 3 cities from Invisible cities: FEDORA, OLIVIA, ESMERALDA. The theme would be escape room & Invisible cities interpretation: link to the current situation where everyone is trapped in their own space and try to escape the state of mind, connecting with other people through the Internet – a way of escaping the reality we are living in right now. Each city has different unique inhabitants, for example, OLIVIA has skeletons since it reflects the industrialization and the repetitiveness of the work people do every day, etc.
Fedora 
Esmeralda 
Olivia
However, since our main focus of the project is the sense of storyness, we found that our approach of recreating the invisible cities did not reflect what we wanted. We brainstormed a new different idea of the escape room theme. The context would be: Protagonist (the user) is a prisoner, wakes up from amnesia, finds themselves in a dark small cell. There is a giant clock on the wall of the cell showing red digits and counting down from 1 hour. This, hopefully, triggers the anxiety and makes the user look for tools and try jailbreak. When the user successfully finds the door to escape, there would be different scenes waiting for them (representation of the past, present, and future of a person). In the final scene, the user can find the door to bring them back to reality. The whole message we want to present through this idea is that every moment in life is precious.
This is a better idea compared to the first, but we encountered one problem. Since each user will have their own experiences, there would be no generic way to layout the scenes that can evoke the feelings/emotions for the user to reflect on. Therefore, we decided to revise the idea into a more neutral setting, which is the undersea environment.
Final idea:
- Beginning scene: neutral, white background – a television (off) -> user must interact (turn on/off) the TV to enter the undersea alternate reality world.
- The same idea before but different scenes, different message: travel through time in the ocean to see how the environmental change reflects during each time period.
- THEME: Apocalypse
- The user would be under the sea, there would be a line (road) that indicates where the user should move to (sunken ship (1920), submarine (2020)) where they would find a button to enter the same scene 100 years later.
- The scenes (3 scenes), in each time period, you still have a clock/sign somewhere to indicate the time (years, explicitly)
- 1st scene (past, 1920): no plastic
- 2nd scene (present, 2020): a lot of plastic but still can be saved
- 3rd scene (future, 2120): a lot of plastic and no animals -> can’t be saved anymore. In this 3rd scene, the user will need to dig into the plastic in order to find the button and travel back to the current time (reality).
- You go back to the present (the beginning scene) and take action to do something to save the environment.
- Message: save the world before it’s too late.
Some clarifications/class feedback/adjustments:
1. The meaning of the TV in the first and last scene: The user needs to interact with the TV in order to move to the undersea scene. What we had in mind was that we could try showing different scenes of the ocean before the user actually experiences it. It’s similar to the fact that most people would just know about the undersea world through the screen but not by actually experiencing it.
2. Reduce the number of scenes to 4-5 scenes: Though it’s a lot of scenes, it would basically come down to these 3 ideas: first is the TV scene which is extremely simple, second is the outside undersea scene (appear three times with different levels of destruction) and third is the inside scene (sunken ship and submarine). In short, we only layout 3 main scenes and then replace a few things in each scene to demonstrate what we want.
3. The use of the button (click): not to have a literal button that triggers changes but something more subtle that blends in with the story – the nautilus
UPDATE April 17, 2020
Tiger and I finished the list of needed assets and created the first scene in our project. In this scene, we added a screen to the TV, which will be used to display the video later.
UPDATE April 20, 2020
After the lecture and class discussion on Procedural Authorship, our team felt like in our project, the players would be in the role of “Ghost without impact” since they will only observe what happened throughout 300 years and do not have any real impact on the environment. Hence, we decided to create some interactions between the user and the environment and limit our scenes to only 2 main scenes:
- The first scene: the users will enter an apartment (which is also their house in the game) where they see some snacks, water bottles, cups, and cans on the table and on the floor. They will get a chance to interact with the objects by grabbing and releasing them. They can also move by clicking the mouse (clicking the button in Google cardboard). The main point in the scene is when they turn on the TV and watch a video/a teaser of the experience they will experience next.
- The second scene: the users enter the underwater scene of 100 years ago. When they explore and interact with the undersea animal, they will leave a trace of plastic behind them (can be the cans, water bottles, or those cups that they saw in the first scene). We also hope to make the scene gradually polluted (sea animals/plants gradually die) that also represents the 3 initial 3 scenes we had in mind (1920, 2020, 2120).
UPDATE April 26, 2020
We finished laying out two basic scenes.
In the first scene, I added objects for user interactions such as cans, chips, water bottles, coffee cups, and wrote scripts for PlayerGrab, PlayerWalk. I also wrote the SceneCtrl for switching scenes later. I also added event triggers for the objects so that when the users gaze at the objects, they can click the mouse/button in Google Cardboard to grab/release the objects.
UPDATE April 29, 2020
After the team check-in, we all agreed on the current design of the environments (of the room and of the underwater scenes) and finalized the interactions we are going to add in the underwater scene. Currently, the user is able to look around using ctrl + moving the mouse in the direction they want to see. They also are able to walk by clicking the mouse (the button clicking in Google Cardboard) in the two scenes.
- The final interaction we are going to add in the white room is the user’s interaction with the TV. When the user looks at the TV, it is expected to change color from black to white. When the user clicks on the TV screen, it is going to show the below video, which is designed by our team member Luize.
- In the underwater scene, every time the user walks around, they will leave a trace of plastic behind them. They can also interact with the sea creatures and animals, and there would not be any immediate effects. However, the scene would change gradually: the environment becomes darker; the fish disappears gradually, etc. The user might not notice this but over a period of time, the change would be significant enough for them to realize their negative impact on the ocean.
UPDATE May 05, 2020
After the first playtesting, we realized that the first scene was not well designed and thus prevented the user from interacting with the objects in the room. Since we wanted to create a setting that truly reflects the daily life in an apartment, we decided to recreate the scene. I was in charge of redesigning the scene and adding interactions in this scene, while Tiger and Luize focused on redesigning the second scene.
In this first scene, I added corals and sharks to hint the user towards something related to the underwater scene. When the user interacts with the objects (chips, coffee cup, milk bottle), they would be constrained on the vertical line, only moving up and down the objects. I limited the movement because I could not figure out the way to make it look natural when the user drops the object. Also, the user can click on the TV screen and the TV will show the video. After the video finishes, the coral on the TV shelf would be lit up, inviting the user to interact with the coral. When they click on the coral, it would lead them to the second scene.
In this underwater scene, after Tiger and Luize finished the design, I added the player walk movement in this scene to make it consistent with the movement in the previous scene.
UPDATE May 08, 2020
After the second playtesting, we realize that the constraint on the movement of the objects made the interaction meaningless. Professor Sarah Krom has been really supportive and helped us out with this problem (by adding a Rigidbody to the food object so we can take advantage of physics when dropping it). I am currently finishing the final touch on the interactions of these objects. I also added the script to hide cursor whenever the user enters the scene.
UPDATE May 11, 2020
The scripts for the food objects worked perfectly thanks to the help of Professor Sarah Krom. The user is able to grab the food objects and drops them anywhere they want. However, there was one problem I encountered when I was working on this part. As we grabbed the food object, its kinematic is set to true, thus ignoring collision. The fix for this problem is Edit -> Project Setting -> Physics -> Contact Pairs Mode set to Enable Kinematic Static Pairs. This will make sure that the collision is still detected when the object is grabbed in hand, thus releasing the object whenever it collides with other game objects in the room.
UPDATE May 12, 2020
While Tiger and I worked on the final touch, mostly for the second scene, for the project, Luize prepared the presentation. I replaced the FPS controller with the player object that can only move by clicking the mouse. Since the movement in the underwater is different from movement on the ground, we decided to keep the movement of the user near the seabed as if the user is swimming through the path.
We also adjusted the frameCount in the scripts to change the speed and the number of plastics, the change of light, and the disappearance of the fish in the ocean. We also adjust the switching scene script to enable to user to go back to the previous room, which is their daily life.
We also thought whether we should change anything in the first room when the user goes back. After discussion, we all agreed that we decided to keep it the same because without any change in behaviour, we cannot expect the change that easy in a person’s daily life. This is the representation of a infinite loop that can only be broken by the change in the awareness and behaviour. And though it is easy to realize how much plastic can be generated by one human being, it is challenging to replace the convenience of plastic in our daily life even though we realize the negative impact of it on the environment.
