Month: June 2022

FMP – Initial Ideas and Proposal

For my final major project and thesis I want to create a project that is inspired by the work of Hazelight studios who create video games that you have to play in Co-op with another player that you know and i want to take this concept into virtual reality and create an experience with this in mind. For the narrative I have also got a strong interest in multiversal media and the stories that could be told in many different ways including Virtual reality.

Multiversal Media

One element I want to explore in a virtual reality experience is the concept of the ‘Multiverse’ and how you can present and play with these ideas. Some media which explores these concepts are ‘Dr Strange and the Multiverse of Madness’, ‘Steins gate’, ‘Tatami Galaxy’, ‘Inception’, ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’, ‘ Looper’, ‘ Spiderman Into The Spider-Verse’ and its sequels.

Cooperative Experience

I want my Final major project to focus on a narrative driven Co-Operative experience that has to be played in multiplayer in Virtual Reality. Some experience that can be taken as reference for this are ‘A Way Out’, ‘It Takes Two’, ‘We Were Here Trilogy’, ‘Portal 2’ and ‘Phasmophobia.

Thesis Research Topic

How multidimensional spaces are being presented through media and virtual reality

Experience Concept

The experience can only be played through cooperative online or local with two players using virtual reality headsets. Each worlds or dimension can have different visual styles and can affect the others dimensional worlds. Different areas can be explored such as how the players communicate either verbally, visually or through interaction etc.

Dream space | Dream Theory | Limitless Space | Impossible Space | Multi-layered | Earth in a World | Endless | Sand | Time

Initial Ideas and Concepts

For my initial ideas i started to write down all of my notes on the whiteboard as i usually do for all of my projects which you can see from some of the images below.

Art Style

For the art style of my project I started to think about unique ways that you could differentiate the two dimensions or worlds from one another which included making both worlds black and white and using some selected colours to make them look different. Another idea was to extend this further by using a form of cell shading which would allow one environment to be black with white outlines and another environment to be white with black outlines.

Some more inspiration I looked into when considering these art styles were paper man, Epic Mickey, Mad world, Trek to Yomi and also for further ideas on changing the world and changing the colours, I looked into De Blob.

Environments

When creating two different environments that need to differentiate from one another in separate dimensions, there are many different ways you can go about this from minor changes to completely different scenery. Some examples of this are games such as ‘The Medium’ in which the character walks through the real world but can also change her mind to her counterpart showing a world rotting away and almost shown as a hell scape. There is also a game called Plasticity which has a very similar concept showing one world clean and in daylight while the other world is dark and grown over or destroyed/taken over by nature of the world.

Narrative Ideas

One element that i need to realise is how the narrative can be explored in this experience such as the idea of the two players being Yin and Yang or night and say which then represent two opposities to one another perhaps trying to bring balance to the world they are in.

Mirror Reflections

One element that I think could work well for a split dimension story, is utilising the reflections or mirrors that could be seen in the environment. There is a range of media which uses this well such as Edgar Wrights ‘Last Night in Soho’ where the two main character are shown through the reflections portraying the same movements and expressions so show they are sharing one mind. This is also shown in Disney’s ‘Sorcerers Apprentice’ where using the characters magic they created a ‘mirror world’ which traps the character that looks visually similar but they are the only inhabitant.

The idea of a mirrored world or alternate world is also shown in Netflix’s ‘Stranger Things’ which portrays a realm called the ‘Upside Down’ which is a dark, post apocalyptic environment of the real world within the story.

CP&E – Final Technical Issues, Making the Build folder and debugging

Final Additions to scenes

In some of the scenes we went through to try and adjust certain areas of dialogue and how things are prompted to the player which included all of us adding some more highlights and even some subtitles to make sure that the player can follow the dialogue more easily during the narrative.

Technical Issues with the Scene changer

We had been working on this project mostly in unity for the past couple of months and experiences minimal technical glitches and problems. However we finally wanted to attempt a build of the whole project which now looking back we wish we had tried sooner because we found that there was a serious problem in the opening scene.

There is a collider in place in the bathroom doorway that when the player enters and walks through is suppose to set active more objects and set active false the collider the user walks through which worked perfectly in unity but in the build it crashed everytime. The build took quite a long time to initiate and so we had not much time to fix this issue and so we had to resort to simply removing that particular collider in the scene which did seem to work.

File Size Issues

Another issue we found with working seperately, merging files and using so many different assets was that the project became very large and over time it grew from 8gb, to 15gb, to 25gb and eventually to 35gb plus which meant that some of the loads times in between scenes could take up to a minute at times and so we had to go through a lot of the scenes and find areas where we could reduce these loads times as much as we possible could.

To resolve some of these issues we went through to bake the lighting and tried to remove some of the overall larger effects because in the 2020s scene it was 2gb of lighting which was insane to us!

We also attempted to lock the frame rate and reduce the overall draw distance to help with the load times on the levels

Changing Colliders in the 1990s and future scene

One of the main issues that we found when building the file as explained earlier was of course the collidrs and so we found that perhaps the set active false of the collider is creating an issue and so we had to go through all of the scripts and create an on trigger exit that would deactivate these instead. This however led to an even further issue where we found that we had written the word exit in upper case which also had a strong effect on the scripts which was annoying but we were able to go through the whole project to try and resolve this.

Problems with certain scenes in the build folder

In the build folder after multiple attempts and changes we were able to have mostly all of the scenes working such as the future and 2020s scene but we had problems where the 1980s and 1990s scene would crash on load. After some code changes and removing certain colliders we were able to restore the 1980s scene so that it would work with the transition but the 1990s scene was still crashing and unfortanately we were running out of time before deadline to try and resolve this issue and had to resort to showing the full level in the recording but of course having the risk that it would crash on that scene in the final build verison of the experience.

Final Submission

We were able to overall successfully get the file size down to a zipped folder of 1.8gb which was good for the moodle submission while also collating all of the other documents including the critical discussion, scripts, data, GDD and many other elements.

Conclusion

Overall i must say that i am very happy with how the whole experience came together that we were able to mostly create and make all our ideas from the original script and concept we had. We were able to create quite a large and hopefully interseting project for the players and the research iterations that we conducted were very helpful and also very interesting to discuss overall. As a group project it was also very enjoyable and collaborative so i feel we had all worked very well together considering the scope and time we spent on this project.

CP&E – Adding in imagery and updates to the UI in VR and AR

Adding Photos to the frames

One of the big elements in our experience was of course the character remembering and reminiscing about their old photos from their past. We had left a lot of these until the end so we could all decide and collate images that could be spread across and combined together accross the experience. Iris was actually able to draw out a good number of photos for this experience that she also tried to keep more anonymous so not to give away from the character might look like or directly who they are which we were striving for a lot when we were designing this.

In our scenes they were added especially to the older age scene for the user to look at at the start and also be interact in some ways as well.

Adding the Painting to the 1990s scene

In our story the character is an artist and we also have a painting interaction where the user can try to reassemble a painting that the character has torn up out of anger. For a long time this particular paintig was a placeholde but i have now finally gone online to find a painting to put in its place as you can see from the images below

This required me to go into Photoshop and try to divide up the painting in the correct size pieces of the objects in the unity experience which overall wasnt too bad to do.

Intro Menu Disclaimer and Tutorial

We realised as well that it would be appropriate to add a disclaimer message and also some information on the controls for the game to appear before the opening men and so these were created as sprites below

These sprites were then added in at the very start of the experience to fade in and out on display for the user before they can see the opening menu button at the start

Adding Glasses and Blur to the scene

While we found that the old age XR rig wasnt too successful we wanted to see if we could find others way to make the user feel older and an easy one for this we found was the user maybe having bad eye sight at an older age. When the user starts the experience they will have a gaussian blur on the lens to blur their vision and they will need to pick up some highlighted glasses and put them towards their head which will then correct their vision which we thought was quite effective overall.

Additoonal Tutorial Elements in the starting scene

To also add some further guidance and help for the user we also decided to add a tutorial message on what the user needs to do in the bathroom and how they should take a medicine to test out the mechanic and once they do they will also be instructed to go to bed after this. This messages fades in and out on display on the mirror in the bathroom when the user enters.

Adding in the AR Images to the User Interface

In addition to drawing photos for the scenes, Iris also created some additional imagery, writing and informaiton to appear around the mirror in the AR experience that can be enlarged for the viewer to see when they are click on as shown below.

CP&E – Additional Scene Interactions and creating the AR User Interface

Old Age Starting Scene

In the future starting scene we wanted a way for the user to navigate through this scene and then be able to continue through the narrative while we knew that the scene changer would load into a different scene. So we created a number of colliders in the future scene which triggers the medicines appearing and also a collider on the bed so when the character wants tot sleep in the story it will change to the next scene which will be the scene changer.

Creating the Level Changer

We added the three medicines into the bathroom and made each one interactive and have a collider which will then be able to trigger the change of scene. We wanted to have it so that when the user comes back to this scene each time the medicine that they previously drank will still be gone and so with a lot of trial and error we did this through static objects in the game manager that will permanenty be set active false after they are collided with the main camera which overall worked very well.

After creating the game manager all of the objects were then linked to the Main camera of the player so that when those particular labelled objects collide with the players head it will trigger the scene linked with that model.

Drinking Sound Effect

We had created now created how the user will transition through the different levels we wanted to further emphasise the effect of taking or drinking the medicine and so the code was changed a but further so that when you lift the medicine to the head collider it will play a drinking sound effect while the bottle dissapears.

Candle Interaction in 1990s

In the 1990s scene i felt that there were still some more interactions that could be added and also help show some additional story elements for the user. In our group we had dicussed that their mother had passed away by this time and this is why they are in the apartment on their own and so perhaps their would be a photo of the mother on display to show this.

I saw an oppurtunity here to add another interaction to this scene by allowing the user to light candles to show respect to the mother character in this particular scene. To do this i added in a lighter model and candles with particle effect flames created seperately above the candles. Thes particule effects were set to false and they could be triggered active on collision with the flame from the lighter which overall did work very well and had the effect I wanted. I improve this further by also having sound and the lighter turning on and off if the player places their hand into its own collider.

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CP&E – Merging Environments and linking into cohesive experience (Scene transition management)

Merging all the scenes together into one project

We decided this week will be when we merge all of our scenes together after working on them seperately to save time and allow us to work on those scene how and when we wanted. This was done by making my file the overall master file with Lin and Iris packaging their scenes so they could be imported into the project.

This method did require some trial and error and having to locate, relink and add in again some certain assets but overall after some time we were able to successfully merge all the scenes into one project and now of cours we need to spend time to make everything cohesive and all works together in one project.

Separating the Bathroom environment for scene change

After some tests we initially planned to have the future scene be the scene changer, start and end but we felt like it would be easier to have a dedicated scene the user will go back and forth to that focuses specifically on this main mechanic and so it was seperated off further int the scene.

Animating NPC character for start and end scenes

The brief requires us to have NPC characters in some way in the scenes and our narrative starts with the doctor talking to the player about the medicines and so I tried to find some models on Mixamo. From the images below you can see that I found this paricular model and textured him in Unity and overall i feel does look the part of the character from the script

I then looked further on Mixamo to find some animations which includes him standing idle, talking and walking to leave the room which I was able to find and implement overall in the scene but i am not an animator and while these are not perfect in the game they do work as a whole.

Experimenting with Elderly XR rig

Creating Rain effect outside the windows

In the 1990s scene i thought it would add more to the atmosphere of it being dark and dreary to add some rainfall outside to really add to this emotion and hopefully show this feeling to the player as well. This was created using some particular effects that are on loop on one side of the building only where it is viewable through the window.

Adding in Spatial Sound into the 1990s scene

I also wanted to experiment with some spatial sound and so I decided to add a radio to the scene that can be playing static and when it is interacted with it can either be tuned or turned off just as some additional elements for the player. Using spatial sound it can sound louder closer up and quieter as the character walks further away.

I also wanted to add some spatial sounds with the rain outside so that when a character walked closer to the window the rain would sound louder and then quiter as they walked away which i thought worked quite well in the whole experience.

Creating AR UI in Spark AR and incorporating Filters

In Spark AR i started to experiment with the overall user interface and how buttons are created and interacted with the in the App which i discovered is straightforward to do but can become quite complex and a lot with the more interactions that are added because of the long string of events which need to be tied together overall.