During the development for this project I have had to rethink a few areas and how i can fully develop a polished experience within the given time frame and I have decided to shorten the experience to only having three levels of difficulty:
Level 01: Easy Difficulty – 3 Words
Level 02: Medium Difficulty – 4 Words
Level 03: Hard Difficulty – 6 Words
I think this will be an achieveable goal to create for this experience and all of these can still be created in one Scene or level just by having the different difficulties load in and out over given times within the game.
Stutter – Environment Script
For this experience i needed to create a simple conversation that could be discussed over three sentences while also conveying different levels of intensities within given conversations and also the frequency of words that will be floating around the player at any given time.
Level 01: Easy Difficulty
A: Hi, Really nice to see you again, how have you been?
P: Very Good Thankyou
This is a very basic level of difficulty where you will only need to create a sentence of three words and the conversation is simpler and approachable for a stutter.
Level 02: Medium Difficulty
A: Glad to hear, How has work been for you lately?
P: Stressful, but pushing through
This is a medium level of difficulty because while the conversation sounds simple its becoming more personal and perhaps the person wasnt ready for a question like this
Level 03: Hard Difficulty
A:oh okay, oh how is your partner lately, still together i trust?
P: Well Unfortunately, We broke up because…
This is where a conversation can become part of a hard difficulty and could become very difficult for a stutterer because not only is it a deeply personal question but could also throw someone off guard and perhaps not knowing a way out of the situation in a ‘socially acceptable’ way.
Game Design Document
Audio Recording
After writing the script for the experience I needed to have recordings of the dialogue to add to the Unity build. I do not personally know anyone else other than some family members who have a stutter and so I am going to have to record these lines because i want the experience to be as authentic as possible. My friend Alex very politely helped me by recording the lines of the person the stutterer is having a conversation with. All of the audio was then edited to be individual for the unity project and i wanted the audio for the conversation to be echoey to show it was coming from outside the mind which i was able to achieve through after effects.
Latest Environment Iteration
Looking through different models on turbosquid I came accross this great model of a cherry blossom tree which i felt suited atmosphere of the environment very well and i was able to add a new material to the object with ease. The environent needed to be typographic so I was able to create a material using images of book pages that would wrap around the tree model with very successful results, especially when it is shown in the dark environment. This material was then also used for the plan or surface that the user is standing on to again simulate being on a book page or part of a story or narrative.
The tree model was the duplicated and placed all around the environment to simulate the user being in a forrest inside a brancing mind which i feel also works very well especially when the whole experience is viewed through VR glasses.
Correct and Incorrect Word Interactivity
Last week i looked into the script required to create a correct word snapping effect for the different sentence structures for the whole experience. The current scene of the project is now set up to have eight different words currently floating around the player in a rather slow manner for the ‘easy difficulty’ section of the experience.
After further discussions with my peers and tutors it was suggested that i could also include a more obvious way of showing when the user has selected an incorrect word. A simple way of showing this is having the incorrect word highlight in red when it collides with the sentence box to show to the player that it is incorrect.
The script is used so that if a object tagged with ‘WrongWord’ enters the collider for one of the correct answer colliders, it will change its colour to red and on exit it will revert back to its original colours which I felt worked very well for the experience.
I initially wanted the words to snap back in place or for the animation to reset if the words were let go but it was suggested that perhaps it would add to the chaotic nature or environment if i turned off the gravity and the words would just float off which is something i will further experiment with in the future.
After some other peer assessment feedback, it was suggested that it would also be great if every time a user grabs a word, they would hear that word as well. So i started to attach some audio files of me saying the words which are floating around which was very useful feedback and something that I will carry forward with the development of this experience.