Over the passed week I began to look more into writing the scripts in unity for this project and what exactly i would need to achieve this type of experience. So to start working on this i decided to strip back the environment to the basics of justt having the words around the player and the objects in which they will snap to.
Levels of Difficulty
To create much more of a game element to this experience and to add more of a ‘fun’ factor rather than having the whole experience be just about how overwhelming a stutter can be on a persons mind I decided to think of the concept of different difficulty levels within the experience:
Level 01: Novice Difficulty – Create a 3 word setence
Level 02: Easy Difficulty – Create a 4 word setence
Level 03: Medium Difficulty – Create a 6 word setence
Level 04: Hard Difficulty – Create a 8 word setence
Level 05: Very Hard Difficulty – Create a 10 word setence
I felt that this would not only get the user use to the experience while not throwing them straight away into the deep end but this could also be a way to show different levels of stuttering in different types of conversations. This will create a much more ranged and interesting environment while also given the player something to aim for and do over the course of the experience.
Movement Animations
One of the first steps was to have the words actually float around the player in the environment which we were taught the basics of animation in Unity during this weeks classes. To test this out I decided to have multiple words to mess around with in the environment by using the starting word I made in Illustrator ‘Thankyou’.
Each word was parented with an empty in the centre of the environment that i named ‘Pivot’. This empty object contained an animation which would loop the word around the player in 360 degrees to have a continuous motion of moving around the player and the environment. This animation was then added to the other words and I decided to change around the movement and the starting position for all of these words and its interesting to see how this can be quite overwhelming or confusing in a virtual reality environment. After testing all of the different speeds i decided on how fast and the frequency of words that I wanted for the start of the experience to not overwhelm the player straight away and get them used to this environment.
Starting to Script in Unity
The next step after creating the initial animations was to try and find a way for the words to snap in place when the correct word is chosen and placed. I initially wanted the words that the player grabbed to snap in place on the ‘correct answer box’ when the object entered the collider but i struggled to find a way of doing this simply. I was then shown a different way of acheiving this by having a the correct answer hidden infront of the box and when the correct word is grabbed and placed, that word will dissapear and the hidden word would appear which would ‘simulate’ a snap in place function.
This was much harder to do than i originally thought however because I had some problems with the XR interaction tool hands. For a long time I was able to achieve the effect of moving the word into the trigger collider and having the hidden word appear but the word that was in hand would not dissapear! This was an error due to the object being held in the players hand so even when the console would say that the object was destroyed it would make a copy in the players hand for some reason. However over time we were able to resolve this issue so that the object would destroy and dissapear when then correct word was placed into that area.
I was very happy to eventually get this function working and each correct answer and correct word will need theyre own scripts to achieve this. However the next step is going to be finding a way to have the words that are floating around which arent correct to either snap back in place if the user lets go or have the animation reset or have a ‘fail’ option in some way.
Environment Setting and Assets
After achieving one of the base requirements for my experience I wanted to start thinking about how the environment of a ‘stutterers’ mind could look. Like i had previously said I wanted the environment to be very typographic in nature while it is also taking place in the mind and so my first thoughts is a world made of words and book pages.
Trees i think would also work well in this environment especially if they were made from words or book pages because this can represent a branching mind showing different paths and ways you can manipulate and control words in the mind. This is my own interpretation anyway of the mind of a stutterer which i feel will make a visually interesting experience for the user.
I started to look into multiple assets in the unity store and turbosquid for trees and forrest environments to try and simulate this effect which i need to continue researching to find different assets and options to create the environment i have envisioned in my head (literally).
Environment Atmosphere and Lighting
There were two options I had for the atmosphere of this environment to either keep it very ‘sepia tone’ and have the book pages fully on show with black text and white environments. However the other option would be to keep the environment very black and dark to have the words highlights and strongly on show. This would also help i think with the effect of being inside a dark mind and not being able to see the end of the void.
After trying different lighting options including having the players under a spot light and having the words shown over a dark background I think this is definately the best way to go for this experience.