After creating my initial idea for this VR environment and discussing the idea with my Tutors i was really excited to begin developing the concept in Unity. I also felt that for now calling the project ‘Stutter’ will be a good starting point based on the concept for this VR environment piece.
The Gameplay
Over the passed week i started to think about how i could create this experience and i decided to keep the interaction fairly straightforward so that the words will float around the user and when they grab the word they can place the word onto a given area to then snap in place and create a full sentence over time.
Importance of Audio
Stuttering is of course a very audible and sound based impediment and so I think that this is going to need to be a major part of this experience. Personally i find that when i want to say a certain sentence and i find myself unable to while stuttering, I can hear myself in my head trying so hard to say the sentence because you know what you want to say but your mouth simply cant get it out. I think that this was also shown brilliantly in the 2015 short film ‘Stutterer’ by Benjamin Cleary in which the main character is shown struggling with speaking but you can hear his internal monologue explaining what he wants to say and how strongly he wants to.
I think that this was done very well and this is something that I would like to do with the audio for my Virtual reality experience. This means that when the user is playing perhaps over time they will hear an internal monologue of the sentence that they need to create but the longer they take (similar to talking in real life) the more the sentences in the user head will overlap and the pressure will be built up to make the sentence in a ‘socially acceptable’ amount of time.
Creating the Environment
I know that for this environment I wanted to keep the entire experience to be very typographic and of course based on reading, hearing and language and so i started to think about how the user will put words together infront of them. After looking through the Unity asset store I found a model for a table which reminded me personally of a typographers table that i felt would suit this experience very well.
Adding Interactivity
I started by downloading and importing the Unity XR interaction tool which is extremely useful due to the preinstalled assets and features it has included for Virtual Reality projects. I then imported the typographers table and placed a few blocks to represent the area that the player will try to place and create words.
To start testing the concept using Illustrator I created the word ‘Thankyou’ as a PNG that could added into the build as a Sprite. Each word has a box collider which the user can then grab and move around to try and create sentences. The idea for this environment will be for the user to grab one of the floating words and place it accordingly on the correct sentence block so if the sentence is only three words, then they will need to create that sentence on the table infront of them over that given them etc.
What to do next?
I feel that I have this project concept and idea in a good place to continue the development but i will need to look to start writing Unity scripts to fully achieve this idea and concept which I will research into and of course continue the weekly Unity classes in the meantime.