The Introduction Scene
After creating the original basis for the introduction scene I then wanted to develop it further to include the original starting line that we were going to include from the script written by Lin which was the ‘Water goes in Water goes out’ and ‘Oh its my feet’. So to simulate this I made it so that the XR Rig was fixed in place and the player would not be able to walk or move around within this scene and I then created a white sphere and added the seagul feet so if the player looks down they might feel like they have the body of a seagull which i thought would be quite funny for the player.
As an introduction for the player which is similar to the credits, there will be a series of different texts appearing on screen. We have now created a couple of texts which explain to the player how to play the game including what the triggers and grips do with some small instructions on how to grab and eat objects in the game just to generally show the player what they can do during the experience. This was again created using a series of PNG files that are coloured in Unity and shown together in sequence using the Animator.
The Credits Scene
After mostly completing the general framework for the credits and introduction scene I felt that the island could look much better and more interesting so i went online again to the asset stores and found some new island models and assets which i felt made the scene feel much more welcoming and more interesting for the player to look around during these short sequences in the experience.
Adding Audio to the Sky Scene
Now that the sky scene is completely set up to incorporate the player standing on top of the seagull I then began to add the audio dialogue for the scene. The dialogue is told through three parts so three speech bubbles appear over time which the player can also grab using their controllers to throw and move around.
Sky Scene Boundary Borders and Wing Animations
When testing the sky scene I realised that there will definately need to be some boundary walls that stop the player from falling off the seagull while moving and so these were simply created using some box colliders with no mesh renderers so they would stop the player from falling and be invisible during gameplay.
To also add some movement and life to the scene I thought it would be great to have a slight animation which actually made the wings flap up and down in a loop to simulate the idea of the seagull actually flying through the sky. This was done simply using an animation which roated each wing up and down to the same position so that they would loop smoothly through the scene.
Importing the Animation Progress
Syncing Up the Animations
After receiving some of the intial animations for the beach scene I started to look into how these can be organised together in one animator that could be triggered during gameplay. So initially i would have the idle animation as the default in the animator and then have public strings labelled ‘BInt01’ etc. which to me means Beach Interation 1 and they will be all labelled in this way. This way in the script I can time the events so that I could play animation string 1 which will then play loop back to the idle animation after completing and then the next string can be accessed and so on until all have been completed.
Triggering Animations
Now that some animations were set up and working in the scene I had to find a way to trigger these animations when the player walks over to the seagulls. So i set up another box collider around the seagulls which will be used as a trigger so that when the player enters the collider and sees that they are tagged as ‘Trigger’ the animation that is on the seagulls will play. The plan is to then have the idle animation as the default that is always running on loop and then the animation scenes will play on the enter of the trigger. This method will be used for all of the animations throughout the experience to play in one after the other or on a certain event or trigger caused by the user or player.
Scene Management
After the general framework was set up for each scene to transiton to one another while some are timed at certain points and others are triggered. However when we initially tried this transition you could see a slight stutter or it felt strange to have the scene just change instantly so we knew that we would need a scene transition effect during the experience. One of the initial ideas was to create an Iris wipe which we werent quite able to figure out the best way to achieve this so i instead used a black canvas that would appear infront of the players main camera and would grow and shrink from the middle of the players field of view to create a wipe transition effect.
This effect is then triggered at certain points in the experience which then causes the wipe to appear for a few seconds, then the scene will change and the same canvas will start in reverse in the new scene which will then wipe to show the new scene the player has entered. Currently this transiton is up to 10 seconds which may be a long amount of time but it works in the grand scheme of things at this stage.