12 April – Brainstorming + Story Board
For this project, Ben, Chris and I decided to go for the theme of escape room. We came up a few ideas when trying to narrow down what specific scenario we wanted to create. And finally we chose to make the protagonist sit on a wheelchair while moving around and seeking clues. We will let the user sit on a chair to simulate the experience on a wheelchair, which can also fit how Google cardboard work. The wheelchair not only gives the limitation in terms of movement in the game, it may also be a core part of our story. We are going to choose the story background in a theater/hospital/laboratory/retirement house because the wheelchair can be connected to these locations. And it will also relate to the protagonist’s experience or identity or gives him reason to take some action.
So far, we spent most of time deciding on the general direction and the mechanic of how the wheelchair will move. We also started to compose our story and design the process of escaping to make the whole thing cohesive and intriguing.
20 April – Paper Prototype
We discussed some story details and made this paper prototype for first testing. We only put the key objects on this simple hospital map to give the general idea. The character can move around on a wheelchair to explore this space. During the paper prototype testing, we’ve received some feedback about the navigation and the style. After the session we also reconsidered how we’re going to construct our story in a better way.
26 April – Scene Layout
We’ve figured out how to control the character. Basically the character will move forward by a long clicking and be able to interact with objects by a short click.
For the scene part, I started from building a basic hospital structure with a few sections. At first, our mood board chose some horror style, but later we found we all preferred more psychological horror and tried to go for a creepy clean style. As we were searching for assets, we didn’t find any that was very suitable. So we just chose a zombie hospital asset as it has a complete set of hospital stuff. But I don’t want to go for the exact same style as provided in its demo scene, so I tried to find a way to set the light in a sense that it look like psychological horror. And we all agreed on this change and these are what we have right now.
4 May – Play Testings
This week we did two play testings. In the first testing we had two separate builds: one on the movement and the other on the scene. But in the second testing we were able to combine the two parts and mostly tested on the space scope, speed choice as well as the general scene settings.
Here’re some points I gathered through the testing:
- To provide the motivation to escape;
- To limit the angle to look down;
- To add more stuff / interactions;
- To add some audio to wheelchair;
- To add some glowing effect;
- To implement object pickup animation;
There’re quite a few useful points and we were also inspired by some of them. By the end of the project, we only had the last point left due to time constraint.
6 May – Ending Scene
To make our story complete, we also decided to add an ending scene after the character managed to escape. Instead of the first perspective, this ending scene is a third perspective from a monitor screen.
When building this scene, the monitor screen is in fact a green filter on UI canvas and the red circle is made by two cylinders. One more detail is in the animation of the player that he will idle back and forth for a few frames before leaving. So it’s more natural to transit from the last scene. Later, this scene also included the audio of computer talking which can help with our illustration of the story idea.
9 May – Sound Effects + Story Reconstruction + Photos Editing
To create more immersive experience and give the character motivation to escape, we think adding audios can be a good way. Besides the basic wheelchair sound effect, there’re sounds only played once at the beginning, sounds within a range of area, and sounds that will be triggered if the user enters certain space. The combination of unknown footsteps and baby cries near the mortuary is meant to create some tension and indicate something undesired may happen. There’s also one moment when the sound of moving beds is left-panned to make the user feel something is on the left. But when he steps out of the trigger area, the sound will be cut off as if what he heard is only illusions.
The tricky settings in this part is that the spatial blend should be set as 1 and doppler factor as 0 to achieve the 3D sound effect. Also for the sound of wheelchair moving, it’s not natural to use Play/Stop to control. Instead I found adjusting the volume only can be a better solution.
For our background story, originally we set it as a world of selling happiness, and that’s why the clue photos are all laughs. However as we kept polishing up narrative details. We think replacing it as an AI/machine-dominated world can make more sense and be more consistent. So we started to guide our narration to that direction.
To match the style of body model, I also updated clue photos as follows:
12 May – Interaction + Scenes Transition + Keypad GUI
As we separately did some portion of the project, we finally combined all of them which includes the wheelman animation, the door animation, keypad system, scenes transition and photo collection interface.
Originally we had some texts and a flickering cursor on canvas in the ending scene, but it was not elegant enough, so we used a dissolve effect to do the transition between the two scenes.
For the keypad system here, we also fixed every problem we met, like fixing the trigger state and placing it right in the center. Also, there’s a “?” at right bottom of the keypad by clicking which you can get an indication of “five-digit password” on screen. At first the user needs to click again after the door opens to enter the next ending scene, but it’s not that intuitive to make him click again. So we just use an “Invoke” function to make a delay after the door animation so that the scene transits more naturally.
For photo collection, when the user clicks the glowing album at very beginning, there will be four red rectangles appearing at left bottom to indicate there’re four photos in total. By clicking different objects, the user can collect photos one by one and get the clues.
We also met a weird camera shaking issue which we are still not sure about the reason. But we later solved it by simply fixing any rotation axis.
