Author: Alyazia

Individual Development Journal

4/12/2021:

We split the islands into the three of us and I came up with the idea behind the one I will be working on which is based around Gluttony.

The island is going to be a sort of maze/platformer covered with giant food. The player has to go through and resist the temptations of food, they can eat to make the stage easier to navigate through however if they eat too much they become overweight and cant move and thus have to start over. This is to relay the message of enjoying the things in life in limited quantities in order to be able to move forward and how gluttony and giving into too many temptations would cause harm in the long run. The player has to make it to the goal in order to continue to the next island.

I sketched how I wanted the map to kind of look like (subject to change since I might be making it smaller as I create it in unity depending on how it runs on AR)

I also tested out assets on Unity.

Finally, I found a free dialogue system for unity that works pretty well, just needs some tweaking and additional work to make it work with mobile.

4/19/2021:

Created the base final layout without the food parts of it (Just the islands and trees etc.)

Also coded and drew hearts for the health system (Still haven’t tested it if it is working properly as I wanted to work on getting the animations and placement of the foods)

4/26/2021:

Coded the movement of the donut pieces and figured out how to make it work with collisions. (Instead of using rigidbody on the donuts I just added a box collider and an “isTrigger”).

I also updated the health system by making it destroy the game object food when the player gets hurt so its like the player ate it.

I completed the navigation and prefabs/layouts. The only thing I couldn’t yet figure out on the base level is the game mechanics for the boss throwing food at the player and the player having to dodge.

I conducted a play test: (Please ignore the screaming child in the background haha)

Through the playtest I realized that the game has a lot of faults especially in terms of navigation. So I updated the hotspot locations and added a few new ones to make movement easier. I also discovered that the hitbox for the donuts was a little too large and I adjusted that as well. From the feedback, I also now know I need to add more simple instructions to let the player know what they’re doing in terms of every part of the stage; The ability to move the smaller food items, the maze being a maze, and to dodge and get to the hole behind the boss in the last area (I also need to get the mechanics for that down or come up with another simpler idea if it still didn’t work). I’m also struggling with getting the game over screen to work so I’ll have to figure that out as well.

Summary of things I still need to do:

  • Get the gluttony monster mechanic to work
  • Add sound effects and music
  • Add some sort of instructions
  • Fix navigation + game over/scene change

4/28/2021:

Added sign instructions, fixed some more navigation and collider issues.

Also got the game over scene + scene change to the next scene based on the box collider trigger to work.

Reading Response 4

The city that stood out to me the most was Eusapia. It is a city that has an identical city underground where all the corpses are carried down to continue their time after death. I found the idea of the existence of both a dead and alive city very intriguing, they say the underground is more advanced and that the living Eusapia had taken to copy the underground. There are also thoughts of the underground Eusapia being the original who built up the upper Eusapia so there is no longer a way of knowing who is dead and who is alive. The concept is such an interesting concept, I love the dualities of both and I think one can imagine being there and exploring the two different areas. I can’t help but think of this as an idea for a story in a virtual reality game where the player could play a human that passes away and finds themselves in the underground city, exploring the place and working on becoming one of the hooded brothers being able to transport between the two worlds meanwhile figuring out the mysteries and answering questions of the truth of this city.

The passage of time isn’t that obvious in the cities description but time does indeed play a role since the city revolves around the living and dead and humans take time to live their lives, pass away and move to the underground. The writer also speaks about the underground city innovating their city at a faster pace to the point that one can’t tell which is the living city and which is the one following along. The people’s work and innovation show the passage of time.

Other examples of living cities have more in terms of description to show the passage of time like Leonia. The city of Leonia is one that changes day by day, they expel goods every day and it expels them more and more every time they do so. As time passes by their surrounding boundaries are all just rubbish and landfills.

Reading Response 3

I enjoyed Murray’s take on the importance and use of agency in games and how that makes them more interactive. A game that popped into my mind when reading is Final Fantasy XIV. FFXIV is an MMORPG that offers players various forms of Agency. One of which is after the game’s first DLC. There is a land called Ishgard that goes through restoration by the end of the DLC. Instead of the game being linear and fixing it up within patches the game developers created an area where players go to with their crafting and gathering classes in order to donate items and objects to fix up the city. There are multiple servers in the game and each one’s pacing of the development of Ishgard depends on the player base’s contributions to the area making the players feel like they had a lot of agency in restoring the area.

Another game that I think offers a player a lot of agency is Valheim. Valheim is an open-world sandbox adventure game where the player is free to do anything they want to do. The players choose what kind of game they want to play. Players can choose to turn the game into a building simulator (https://www.reddit.com/r/valheim/comments/lz4upv/cheats_wip_valheim_is_not_a_citybuilder_so/) focus on creating a house and base, gardening and cooking, beast taming and breeding, exploring and adventuring into tombs and dungeons, role-playing and turning the game into a PVP battle arena, etc. the possibilities are endless, the player’s imagination is the limit

These examples are of things that allow players to feel like they truly constructed their own world by strongly feeling their own presence and how that impacts their environment. You can view the difference in immersion when being compared to older more linear games like an extreme example, Super Mario Brothers where the player has no choice at all they just go forth on a linear one-way path.

P2 Progress

Navigation

In the video, you can observe the three ways of navigation; walking, hotspot movement (implemented similar to the first project), as well as climbable pine trees.

I included tree climbing as a way for the player to elevate themselves and take a wider look and a new perspective on their surroundings. The hotspots serve as a way for people to move around if they aren’t in a large space.

Interaction

Based on the feedback of my idea presentation I chose to implement the creature interaction where the player would be petting and feeding these creatures around. I have two ideas for this:

  • 1. Petting foxes and feeding them while going around and attacking enemies. The enemy mechanic would be similar to the project one mechanic where you just need to tap and they die but I was thinking of adding sound effects or something like that.
  • 2. The player would essentially be purifying foxes by feeding their angry slime blob form; when the player feeds the red blob it would turn into a fox and you can pet it and go on purifying the rest.

I’m attempting to go for the second idea of purifying the creatures because it seems like a more thought out mechanic all linked to each other that makes sense to me.

I will first attempt to implement the petting mechanic then the creature to fox when feeding, I’m unsure how I’ll go about animating the transition though.

This interaction goes hand in hand with the story behind the forest, the human is the protector and they have to help the creatures of the forest that transformed into blob monsters trying to attack and consume all the mushroom magic.

I’m thinking about the berry button being a sort of cue that they can use on something. I thought of also adding a voice or text, in the beginning, telling the player to feed the monsters and purify them back to their original forms.

P2 Idea: Magic Forest in AR

  • How my space will evolve:

I’d like to add more storytelling aspects to it, I want the forest to feel more lived in with more things like the camping chairs I included in my project one. I was thinking about changing the story to the user wanting to make the forest feel more alive (Including more in the interaction ideas).

  • Navigation:

Walking normally with the phone in addition to being able to climb up all pine trees to see a wider view and a few teleportation hotspots for the sake of people with smaller spaces.

  • Interaction ideas:
  1. Enemies: Similar to project 1’s enemies but more thought out including the user’s hands in order to attack and having a more responsive experience rather than just clicking them with one tap.
  2. Planting: The user would be planting more mushrooms and plants in order to make the user help the forest grow and prosper.
  3. Populate the area with creatures/Take care of creatures: Adding various animals to make the forest feel alive. Or there would be creatures and the player would be able to feed them and pet them.
  • Images:
  • Screen recording:

Reading 2 Response

Reading about the fragility of immersion really opened my eyes to what it means to be an immersive storyteller. The author speaks about the importance of having consistency, active creation of belief and careful regulation in the boundaries between the imaginary and the real in order to maintain immersion. After reading I explored a few 360 experiences and attempted applying Murray’s arguments on them. The one that stood out to me the most was this experience:

VR Spacewalk Experience Video

Overall, I found this experience to be very immersive. The areas that take away from that immersion is the nature of the google cardboard. During the spacewalk, the viewer is asked to do things around the spacecraft which took me out of the immersion since I was sitting there not doing anything and watching my virtual hands move all on their own. Outside of that, the experience succeeded in being immersive through all the details they provided. First of all the voice of the guy talking to you and the voice-effect he had on allow the viewers to really take on the costume of the astronaut. Details such as the heart rate and oxygen levels also aided in the feeling that it was real, when the astronaut leaves the spacecraft and looks out at the earth you look down and see your heart rate go up which helps connect the video and your real-life reactions. Another area that aided in immersion was the intricate and heavy movement the astronaut makes, it is more believable you are in space because of how those movements help in making you believe the gravity is different. The overall experience was very consistent in all the space-astronaut details, with the placement of objects and the tasks the astronaut has to do, the different voice overs and the count downs, and the weight of the astronaut.

P1 Progress

After getting the primitives down I started creating the scene with assets from the asset store, I used a lot of different ones for the base I have now which includes different assets for the ground, trees, mushrooms, mushroom houses, sky box etc.

Looking at it in this stage, I am not satisfied with the visuals but I did what I could with free assets. I might attempt to create some of my own assets to exchange to make a better aesthetics.

I added the three focus points and changed the elevation in each to be different from each other. The camera, in the beginning, is behind some trees, so the player would come in feeling like somewhat of an outsider. Then they come closer being able to look at the mushroom house as well as around at the forest.

  • Hotspot 1
Starting Point
Hotspot 1 view 1
Hotspot 1 view 2
  • Hotspot 2
Hotspot 2 view 1
Hotspot 2 view 2
  • Hotspot 3
Hotspot 3 view 1
Hotspot 3 view 2

The views that are on the ground bring the feeling of closeness to the village, you look around and get to know the area. As you go up, the player feels more in control of the location, as a protector of this forest that feeling of being able to look at and survey the small village is important.

I still need to work on changing and adding more to the scene and adding more lights for the mushrooms. I would also like to change the hotspot’s visuals to glowing mushrooms as well as adding more objects to make the village feel lived in. I also would like to work on the enemy mechanic but I am unsure how I’ll go about doing the enemy one since the environment alone takes a lot of time to complete.

I faced an issue where things would look different in the IOS build, the mushrooms went bright pink that I ended up changing the shader to a flat colored one. In the google cardboard, the ground also seemed to disappear, so I’ll need to fix that as well.

Google Cardboard Build Screen recording