Category: Part 3

Alternate World

Development Journal P3 Sree

Project 3: Exploring Duality!

Group: Alex and Sree 😀

03/28

We had a lot of work plated around, so we met a couple times, and a lot of our production/ideation also happened through messenger chats and links shared.

We realized that we had a mutual interest in thinking about something that wasn’t lead with a “narrative” per se, and vibed really well in our aesthetic interests.

03/31

We shared things we found interesting in terms of the aforementioned aesthetics. Alex shared with me the moodboards she had for her pitch and we decided that we would be going in that direction. I shared the below examples as sound environments inspirations.

We wanted the world to react similarly to how the sound changed with the position/exccitement of the character
interesting specific sound work

Also, Alex aestheticized (the super cool designer she is) our sketches/idea for the worlds and their portal existence.

04/03

I need to figure out this portal! I’m looking at a bunch of the lab sessions we had, and also for the tutorials I could look at to figure this out. I know there’s one that has a good bit of code in it.. but trying to find something perhaps easier?

Scene manager could be used to trigger, but I want something more seamless.

04/04

It’s going to have to be the Brackeys video. it’s fine I can sit this through–there’s a shader I’ll have to steal!

Okay I need to look at some AR basics again and understand how this works–getting a barebones scene

04/10

Okay, so this portal isn’t working.. I’m going to have to rebuild everything, and hopefully separately to see if the world works.

04/18

Portal work is starting to feel redundant, I should probably think about the sound world, and start implementing. I can make an initial list of what the world are and they sound like, and select some basic world sounds/environments. I have two in mind as of now as the core sounds environments.

core music for the dissonant world
core music for the pleasant world

04/24

Okay! The portal works independently. I built it initially separately with no AR camera, and then rebuilt with the AR camera. Turns out the main thing I was missing was adding a Rigidbody and collider to the AR camera, and the collider plane detects the transition to the other world.

04/28

The portal is having issues into AR from the editor view, So we might have to have a backup which woudl still trigger a different scene using scene manager (This is what I ended up using in the final project)

I combined two mechanisms, first one to “Show” the other world (inside) the portal by having a camera in the other world mirroring its view on a plane.

The second mechanism was a simple colider trigerring a new scene. As soon as the person approached the portal, it triggered a different scene which would do the opposite, spawning in the other world, with the portal in this world showing the previous.

This was the glitchy backup we had to resort to since the working portal would’nt translate to AR.

Project 3 Documentation

Make a blog post containing below items, and put it under category P3 Documentation.

  1. A link to the Github repo, which contains the complete Unity Project
  2. Google Slides (embed in the post or paste an accessible link)
    • First, show the working thing
      • A screen recording of the app
      • A video recording of an user using the app
      • Several presentable screenshots
    • Secondly, explain the idea
      • What’s the experience and world view, what’s the motivation and goal
    • Thirdly, how did it go?
      • Go through process, challenges, things you learn
      • Any documentations you have (e.g. WIP screenshots, sketches)
      • Any final thoughts

To officially submit Project 3 for grading, email me the link to the post before class on Monday.

Development Journal

06/05: Individual Documentation & Journal

Please check my documentation here.

Please refer to this link for the project.

Videos Demo and Testing:

Dungeon Demo 1
Dungeon Demo 2
Dungeon Testing

14/4: Building a Dungeon

We work on different islands for our Project 3 and later will link them to the main land. I am working on an island that addresses the concept of greed.

When players cross the bridge to enter this island, an entrance to a dungeon materalizes in front of them. If they choose to enter, the Trial of Greed commences.

Entrance of the Dungeon

Inside the dungeon, players need to go through numerous trials to reveal their true personality. The moment they give in to greed, they will fall to their doom.

Inside the Dungeon

Only when players successfully go through all the qualification trials will they be able to face the boss – the monster whose existence is the pure form of greed. Only successfully defeating the boss will the Trial of Greed be completed.

The Boss Room

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.

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