Author: mbn304

Individual Development Journal

2/4

for the project I was tasked to make the slow-motion and movement and shooting mechanics for the game. so for the first week I tested on how the slow motion mechanics work in unity and how I can translate unity’s FPS template into the VR game. I was able to able to make a first person camera and movement using Nav Mesh AI but the slow motion of mechanic was inconsistent and did not slow down things as I wanted to be. But overall I got a sense of how the mechanic will work and I can experiment for the rest of the week on how to make the slow motion system.

11/4

I was able to figure out how the slow-motion can work in relation to the Nav Mesh movement system (unity forums helped with 70% of the code). I download some assets and animations from mixammo and SketchFab. I also found an low poly human asset that was made of several parts that could be moved around individually so it made for some good shattering effects. I was able to achieve a lot this week as the most important and weird thing the slow motion worked and the rest was just following YouTube tutorials to implement others things. so by the end of the week I was able to make a small working demo of how the game will work like that included enemy AI, Special effects, shooting and slowmo mechanics and fun trickshots.

19/4

for the third week I started working on my level. since it was the third and last level of the game wanted to portray it as being grand giving the sense that you as the player have reached the deepest files of the computer. to start the level off I downloaded some assets from sketch fab that looked like a big obelisk. after that I wanted to plan a way for the player to reach the obelisk from the starting point. I started by making a bridge from where the player spawned to the entrance to the obelisk. This along with giving the level a nice linear design allowed the player to soak in the details of the level.

Afterwards I refined the way the player would move across the bridge by adding enemies and making a section where the bridge would fall and the player would have to traverse the broken part my going on a platforming section. this allowed me to break the constant shooting the player had to do and allowed for some room for creativity. for this I imported more bridge assets from Sketchfab and deconstructed them to make them look like a cluttered mess the player had to navigate through to reach the other side of the bridge.

After completing this section I felt that the assets did not go well with the design of the level I wanted to portray. therefore I started looking for something that might tie in all the assets as one as well as give the final level a DOS type feel to it. after a while I found two shaders that would help me achieve this. one was a wireframe shader that displayed the raw mesh of assets and the other was a shader that only showed the edges of objects. I combined these two by first making putting the wireframe on the assets I wanted and second by putting the edge detecting shader on a cube, making it transparent and putting it on the camera so that the shader is applied to everything the player looks at. with this I was able to achieve the results above.

25/4

After making the bridge section of the level I wanted to make a section where the player would go up the obelisk to find the data there. I stated my making a staircase where the player would go up while encountering enemies to reach the end goal. but after making the stair case it became apparent that it make the section uninteresting as the player only moved up the stairs and shot enemies. instead I made the staircase into two segments with floors in between them. this allows easy placement of enemies as well as a more defined approach to the level.

30/4

I spent some time refining the level by adjusting the position of enemies and assets as well as polishing and removing bugs from the level. I also added a trigger function to the level which deloaded the previous segments of the level and loaded in the new segments of the level to reduce the amount of recourses being used by the level

1/5

Reading Response 4

Invisible cities was a incredible read . There were a lot of cities that caught my interest with there weird and fantasy like structures but if would would pick one I would say Cities and Desire 1: city of Dorothea. The city highlights the importance of different perspectives. The city also tells of how a person’s own interests can wary their experiences as Marco being a merchant describes the “bergamot, sturgeon roe, and amethysts” that the city contains while a person interested in ruling will only see how it fits in the grand scheme of things.  Dorothea tells about the different number of worlds out there to experience. Cities and the sky 1. The city of Tanara functions as a hub of symbolism where everything is depicted through signs and prints. The vendors’ wares show how symbols themselves aren’t valuable and don’t mean anything on their own. Instead, they connote the value or the meaning of something else.

These concepts of illusions and perspectives are very interesting and if these things are to be represented in a virtual environment there are a lot of possibilities to be played around with them. one of them could be of symbols or items that the player at first glance sees as useless or having on interaction. but as the player gets more information through a story the player can revisit the item or symbol and try to use it with new found knowledge in order to open or progress the story. another aspect can be the player revisiting the same location again and again but with different objectives in mind that could lead them to different places as they would see the location with a different perspective. or something related with reversing time where the player on his first playthrough would encounter and do the story as they please. but they have the options to go back a certain period in the game to change something in the current state of the game because they now have a different perspective or objective to accomplish in the game.

P2 :Sky Base (Progress)

Overview of the level
The entire Scene with all the particle effects and scripted events running. Most of the level has animations in it.
The Hotspot Model is a animated drone

A lot of progress has been made on the project. I have to make a few more additions in terms interactivity that we covered in the lab to complete the project.

Navigation:

There are two ways to navigate the space. one way is to physically move around in order to explore the environment. the second way is to use hotspots to move around the environment. There is a also a third way to move for one segment and that it by climbing the ladder.

I choose these for a couple of reasons. first, since it is a AR game it would be appropriate to have a mechanic of movement the ties the virtual world with the real world by physically moving. Second the movement mechanic is still a quirk and you would need a big space to comfortably explore the area so in order to facilitate exploration without the movement mechanic getting in the way of that so Hotspots were made and put at idea locations as a form of teleportation. the Hotspots also allow the player to look at the environment through idea positions that make the environment more special. the third is that the level should not feel flat it should have a form of 3d transversal in it. so for that the ladder mechanic was implemented. moreover the hotspots have also been put at different heights and the level is also made at 3 different heights to facilitates verticality of the level.

Interactions:

For interaction I wanted to do something that tied in with the concept of exploration. for that I have made these interactions.

  1. The player can pick up and throw canisters around the level. there will be a location where the player can place the canisters that they have collected from the environment.
  2. The player can fire the big three turrets from the control tower by touching the respective panel
  3. The player can rotate a small antenna on a device put on the landing platform. (WIP)
  4. The player can push one of three buttons on the landing pad to change the color of the signal flare(WIP).
  5. The player can click on random object to get a dialogue response out of the player.(WIP)

These Interactions will be made obvious through placement and maybe lighting hints. other than that it is the players job to explore and find these random interactions.

Sky Base

How my space will evolve:

I will be cutting out the castle from my first project and transform the rest of the space into a floating defense base recycling the turrets and platforms already made in P1. I plan to replace the castle with a landing pad. This would be done to increase the performance by having something less complex and would also for a more open ended space for exploration. The main feature of the sky base will be a command node where the player can click buttons to activate turrets or make them fire.

Navigations:

The command node will be accessed by a ladder. The player can move around by walking . There would be some drones hovering around that you can click as hotspots to get a better view. If there is time I might add a camera filter to the drones to make it look like you are looking through them.

Interactions Ideas

Click on objects to trigger dialogue or comments from the player about them. The command node buttons to make turrets do something special will also be interactions. The drones will also be a fun form of interaction.

Video/Images: I just came up with the idea so lots of modifications need to be done at the moment.

P1 Progress

Continuing with the Sci-Fi gothic theme the level will be focused around exploring a ,large castle-like hall, sci-fi labs and enjoying the large open area view. Here are some screenshots of different levels of progress.

At the start I made a basic layout of the level and then sculpted the level using Unity Pro builder
Afterwards I downloaded some assets and texture to make the scene look more complete
This is the interior of the main level. The statues are assets the rest of the level was made using pro builder.
This is how the level looks like after adding texture from the unity asset store

Reading Response 2

Zero Days VR and Notes on Blindness are in my opinion perfect examples of how VR on mobile devices should be made. One of the main concerns of mobile VR is that due to the technical limitations of the VR device and phone explorable experiences are hard to make. experiences that take full advantage of murray’s rule of spatial is hard to perfectly portray in such situations. Instead the experience should take the player on a journey rather than let the player find the journey in the experience.

Zero Days VR takes a documentation approach where the user travels through digital cyberspace with narration of what they are seeing. This linear journey really takes full effect of border of illusion where instead the user only listens to the narration, the narrations complements the visual presented to the user and engages the user in trying to tie in the narration with what is going on visually. One good example of this would be when the user is presented with a virus moving through circuits, it look like the virus is dodging obstacles but when the narrator explains that the virus is looking for the actual target it adds a whole new meaning to the visuals. The only thing that was bad in the experience was the lack of spatial affordance of the VR. everything was in front and looking around did not provide much

Notes on blindness also does something similar where the narrations and visuals go hand and hand to make a enjoyable experience. border of illusion, mechanics to simulate physical acts was really present through the experience. it gave the user a sense of what was being discussed through its visual presentation where blindness and how a blind person navigates is beautifully presented. using particle effect to simulate footsteps making vague figures of people and world building through narrating and visualizing every single detain really gave the illusion of a believable world. The only thing that hindered the experience was that towards the second half the narrations didn’t slow down and didn’t let the user absorb all the detail before moving on to the next one.