December 2021 – Cal Thorndyke VR

Mind the Gap – Drivers Carriage, Train Tracks and Game Design Document

Creating the Drivers Carriage

After finding a train carriage model that worked very well for the design of my experience i knew that i needed a drivers carriage section and I was not able to find a suitable model so i decided to create an area myself using Unity 3D modelling.

After creating a drivers carriage model that will sit at the front of the train I found a 3D model of a chair and used one of the animated Adobe Mixamo models to be the Antagonist or entity of the whole experience that will sit at the front of the train. In the full experience they would turn around and full talk and interact with the player for a short time before dissapearing and leaving the player on their own before the train crashes.

Train Tracks/Tunnel

After adding the drivers carriage I started to think about the player looking out the window or out of the front of the train during the short time that they see and iteract with the antagonist of the experience. I decided that it would make sense to add some headlights to the front of the train to highlight a bit further ahead of the tunnel in case the player was to looking out to see whats in front of them during the experience.

One the headlights were added to the train, I then decided to add some train tracks that woudl appear under the train. The environment tunnel is very dark and the player wont be able to see the start and end of the tunnel so the tracks dont necessarily need an animation for movement and can appear just under the train, the lights will have the movement effect of the tunnel.

Game Design Document Updates

I have also spent some time working on the Game design document for the Mind the Gap experience by updating the template which was given to use going through the story, gameplay, assets, ethical challanges etc. as shown in the document below:

Mind-The-Gap-Game-Design-Document-Cal-Thorndyke Download

Next Steps

Overall i think i have the environment in mostly a good place where all assets and areas from my script and storyboard have now been created. The next step would be to try and add some minor interactivity and also now making the experience playable in Virtual reality by being able to look in this environment using a VR headset.

AR Ceramics – Blender 3D Modelling and Animation Issues

During this passed week I have been trying to export animated models based on tutorials that i followed online but unfortunately I have been continuing to have issues with either the software crashing, models not showing or animations not working in Unity.

Models not exporting correctly

Some of the methods that i previously found online had issues where the animation wouldnt bake or would only part bake and resulting in models in the middle of the animation and appearing like the image below:

Model/Plane property Issues

Using some other methods in blender to create flower models such as using certain faces of the UV sphere also resulted in the models being recognised as planes in unity meaning that one side is completely see through and the other side works correctly which resulted in the image below for some models:

Animations not working

After a while some models would export correctly as static models but any animations that i created in blender wouldnt translate correctly into unity or at least wouldnt work with my current knowledge of both software meaning that the animations would not work or only part worked for certain areas or aspects of each model.

Next Steps

Over the christmas break i will need to continue to find a solution to my exporting/animation problems with the models or find a different solution to continue developing this idea for my AR ceramics project.

Stutter – Polishing Some Bugs/Gameplay Issues

Boundary Area

I initially placed in the boundary area around the entire environment but I did realised that some of the walls were working correctly and it was possible still for the player to wall off the edge of the environment. After checking through again I found that it was a simple issue where the walls had a box collider instead of a mesh collider. Once this was updated the boundary walls worked correctly.

Hard Difficulty Fixes

After doing some playthrough tests of the experience i realised that the third word ‘We’ in the hard difficulty stage wasnt snapping like the other words but when you attempt a few times to put it in place, the counter would still trigger and eventually trigger the transition to the credits.

After going through all of the words and scripts for this bug i realised it was a simple ‘Tag’ word problem where one of the words was incorrectly labelled. So thankfully after changing this the rest of the experience worked correctly.

Instruction Updates

After trying the experience again i realised that the instructions at the start of the experience dont necessarily explain the controls to the user. I realised that to a casual player they may not realise straight away how to control the game so i have now added how you will need to use the triggers to grab and what each controller joystick does for the character movement around the environment.

Mind the Gap – NPC Characters and Level Models

Over this passed week I have spent some more time working on the unity environment for my VR experience by looking into models and assets that are necessary in my script.

Adding Level Assets and 3D models

I have previously added some models for the third puzzle which are some suitcase/luggage models but for the start of the experience there needs to be four objects that the player can choose from. These objects are a Book, Gun, Watch and a Wallet and using Turbosquid i was able to find models for most of these items except for the Wallet which I have simply put a square object in place for now if I am not able to find a wallet model. All of the models are currently coloured in Green to make them stand out for this environment build of the environment.

Adding NPC Characters

When the player first starts the experience in my script they will see multiple NPC characters sat around them in the drivers carriage that they cannot interact with and are only there for a short time before the lights cut out and they are sent into the full experience.

I started by looking on turbosquid for male and female character models but then we also have access to Adobe Mixamo which has multiple character animations and base models which will work perfectly for this environment. So i started to download a few character models which had different animations for sitting such as idling, moving arms or sitting with their legs crossed etc. which I then placed around the train carriage duplicate i made for the starting and end area of the experience.

Next Steps

The next step for this environment build will be to create a drivers carriage area because I was not able to find a model that suited what i needed based on my script/storyboard and so this will need to be created in Unity or modelled in a 3D modelling software.

Stutter – Final Crit Presentation and Feedback

This week we had our final crit presentatations where we presented our current progress with each project and a chance to receive feedback and guidance on where to take the project next before the final deadline.

Stutter Draft Gameplay Capture

The video belows the current iteration of stutter and its gameplay which i presented to the class during the presentation showing the general gameplay, environment, sound and and discussing any changes and updates id like to make for the rest of the projects duration.

During the presentation i also displayed my curent progress with the game design document, world layout, player journey and the environment in unity etc.

Feedback and next steps

After presenting to my class and teachers I recieved some very helpful and positive feedback regarding the VR section of this experience. The main feedback was to add a few more elements possibly to the environment and to work on sound mixing and possibly making some changes to the word rotation animations and the fonts that are being used for the experience. I will of course also need to work on having a fully playable build with minimal bugs and polish for some user testing and further feedback and suggestions.

AR Ceramics – Final Crit Presentation and Feedback

Blender Animation

The video below shows my current blender model and animation that i created for this AR piece. However i was only able to show it in blender as i was having some issues with exporting the model and animation for use in Unity which i will need to look into to continue this project further.

AR Ceramics Test footage

The video below shows my current experimentation with the AR Ceramics piece by using my original flower modela and animating them simply in unity to demonstrate how this would work in AR using a QR code as the target for the whole experience.

Feedback and next steps

After presenting the current progress of my AR project including the current models, animations, tests and game design document the feedback was very positive and agreed that it would be great to have the blender model fully working in unity to develop this idea and concept further to have a refined and polished experience. I will also need to start testing the experience on a mobile device using Vuforia.

Mind the Gap – Updates to the Storyboard

Over the passed couple of weeks i have spent some more time working on my storyboard in tiltbrush while also learning some mroe about the software. I have gone through and tried to make sure everything matches and is in line with my script/story and making sure it is presented properly within the software.

I also spent some time learning how to use the camera paths within tiltrbush which allow you to smoothly record anything that you want within the software which is shown in the video below:

Stutter – Game Design Document and Player Journey Updates

After focusing a majority of my time on this project developing the experience in Unity i spent this passed week going back and writing up the Game design document and making updates to the player journey for this experience.

Game Design Document

We were given a template/guide on how to create the game design document and using this guide i was able to develop and write a full GDD for ‘Stutter’. This document explains the story, gameplay, influences, mechanics, what sets this apart and the required assets. The player journey and world layout were also included in this document.

Stutter-Game-Design-Document-Cal-Thorndyke_V01 Download

The Player Journey V02

Initially my player journey only focused on displaying the correct and incorrect words for the player but I have now tidied up the journey and also included a world layout/environment layout to fully show and explaing what you will be doing during the entirety of the experience.

Stutter_Player-Journey_V02 Download