After realising some initial ideas for my final major project and thesis I started to further think and develop my idea and how i could progress further with my project.
Initial unity Test Concepts
One idea that i was playing around with is how the player can see the other player through reflections in the environment and how this can be achieved through Unity.
I decided to create a demo hallway of how this practice could be achieved and one inspiration that I got for this concept was through a previous project shown to my by my teacher Herman. His game involved a never ending corridor that changed as you moved around it but his method of doing this involved having multiple rigs set up around duplicates of the same environment which would move the player seamlessly between them as they crossed certain paths or areas.
So i started to think about how this could be done in for my multiverse reflection idea to have the player two move around player one without them noticing. So i made one corridor and then made multiple duplicate corridors around this area with multiple XR rigs that could be turned on and off as the player walks through colliders which will hopefully seamlessly move them around these corridors creating the illusion of the reflections in the world.
I did look into how you could use camera in the game to simulate the reflection but the results weren’t promising resulting in warping or the perspective just not working very well rather than just actually seeing the player around you.
Ideas for the narrative and Story
I began to think of a general narrative for my experience which ended up involving the multiverse and the player being able to communicate, see and interact with their otherworld counterpart which will be player one and player two. The narrative will involve the multiverse falling apart in one single area and this area the player will see one another through reflections within the world.
The area in which the world is falling apart is a hotel and so this allows me to create one sort of area or corridor that the player can progress through and some puzzles or tasks can be created around this area allowing the players to move through the hotel environment. I started to think about what kind of tasks the player could complete and also how the hotel could be used in these tasks:
- Puzzle 01 (Mirror Room): Visual puzzle through reflections where users have to interact and see objects at the same time through visuals only
- Puzzle 02 (Raining Alley): visual puzzle through up and down reflection to find objects underneath reflected objects in the sapce
- Puzzle 03 (The Elevator): This set piece could involve one reflection being able to see the buttons while the other needs to interact with them or move certain things out of the way (Elevator Button)
- Puzzle 04 (The Hallway): Sound based puzzle where players talk and communicate
Each of these tasks or puzzles can involve ways in which the players can utilise maybe hearing one another, seeing one another or one only being able to do a certain thing that the other cant. These ideas will continue to be developed further.
Drawing out the map designs and world layout
After deciding some of the initial story ideas of setting the game in a hotel environment, I started to draw or sketch out some ideas of how this world layout could look and how the mirror reflections could be utilised in this environment.
As you can see from my initial sketches below I have essentially drawn out a long corridor that both of the players can progress through together to complete some tasks to eventually reach the end of the experience and complete the game together. The Red markers on the map are doors that the player will not be able to go through and the blue markers are doors or entrances that the player will be able to open and progress through further.
The purple markers are the more tricky elements which show how the players will see one another in the environment such as seeing each other on the reflections in the walls on their left and right. However i have also thought about how this can be enhanced further and the players could see each other above and below themselves as well as you can see from the larger purple elements in the map.