XR Concepting & Design
The concepts we have been working on and designs.
Pressure Cooker: Week 1
Idea 1:
We started this week off by creating multiple small team concepts for a VR experience. Both times switching teams. The first one we made was a time based game where players would have to race to collect carrots which they could use to feed rabbits. We came up with this concept by having 3 timed sessions of 6 minutes, each person writing down their idea/s. Each time the timer ended we passed out notes to the person to the right of us, repeating the procedure. at the end we gathered notes and decided together which was better and if we could adjust it.
Idea 2:
The second team idea we came up with by writing out all the ideas we had for 10 minutes. Afterwards we discussed which ideas we liked and adjusted them to fit everyones needs. This concept was an experience about a animal that lost his home/family by the destruction of mankind (deforestation).
Team Concept: Maritime Pollution
After all of this we had to create teams and come up with a new concept which we would be working on the rest of the week. This concept was formed from the real world problems that the United Nations are currently facing.
Our problem was Maritime Pollution so we started to brainstorming with a 10 minute session writing all the ideas down on paper and then talking about which ones we liked and what we could add to it.
After numerous hours of discussing the following points we came up with a small document for our concept.
Brownboxing was the next thing on our to do list. This is a method used to physically test the concept which i will discuss more in XR Testing.
Afterwards we started to design this concept in Styly (a lightweight web-application used to quickly create a concept and test it). Using Styly we were able to import models and use them in a 3D environment. Not only models but animations could be used
Doing this gave the user an idea of what we were trying to communicate. Users that tried to test our game found the general idea very amusing and mostly understood that we wanted to do something with ocean pollution. On the other hand we found it was pretty difficult to simulate our VR navigation method in a physical environment.
Another thing I learned was how I could use Styly to quickly prototype a VR concept that we could test seeing what works and what doesn't.
Pressure Cooker: Week 2
Individual VR Concept:
After Coming up our team concept, it was time to work on a Individual concept. To start off I wanted to do something that with give players a tense experience. Being a big horror fan has meant I always wanted to do something with horror myself.
The Maze!
I like the idea of being in a constricted environment with either the choice to fight or flee. So the idea of being stuck in a maze came pretty quickly. This meant i needed create some maze pieces and because I am not mucht of an artist i had to come with a way that i didn't have to manually place every maze piece. Fortunatly for me there is a Udemy course on procedually generating a maze by Penny de Bijl.
Seeing as how my main focus in game development is back-end and making stuff functional and less on the artistic side. I decided decided this was something I could use and only cost 12 euro for a 20.5 hour course which I thought was well worth it.
Another thing I wanted to do was experience this with multiple people. However having multiple people running around in a mzez and just seeing each other was not enough, you at least need to be able to hear each other scream! Starting to sound like a lot of work right? maybe just a little :D.
Photon2?
So something I could use for this a plugin in the Unity store (FREE which is always good) for networking, Photon has a free liscence for up to 20 users on a server at the same time. Well 20 should be more than enough for this concept.
So, we have networking down, at least as an idea we can use, but how can i do voice chat?
Starting to look like this might actually become something. For voice chat we also have a Photon voice plugin.
So we have something for the players to do, which is run around a maze and interact with each other. But that alone isn't very horror-like is it? We need some kind of setting or atmosphere. Walking around in daylight seeing everything from a distance isn't very scary though so i wanted to make it dark and give they players a flashlight.
That could give the players a tense sensation, and not to forget they need to have a reason to be afraid, which means we needed something running around the maze chasing them, and who doesn't love giant spiders?
Luckily i already had a asset pack from a while back which i got for one of my own projects.
Materials
Pixplant is a free prgram that is used for extracting materials from textures. After adding an image to Pixplant you can generate all kinds of mappings (Diffuse/ Normal/ Displacement/ Specular and Ambient occlusion) that are used to make a material look good. Each mapping gives the material some extra detail.
So i guess it's time to work on the assets?
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