Category: Critical Practice & Exploration

We have spent some time further developing the script and narrative of the whole experience by trying to write different elements and parts of the script including dialogues for certain characters, what NPCs we can use and also how to start and end certain sections of the narrative while trying to make it all cohesive.

We also continued to delop and refine other scenes based on all of our story ideas such as trying to make the young age scene include a birthday party and show how the mother could be present but not yet needing other characters in the scene by making it before the party begins on that day.

We also wrote down some additional notes and ideas after speaking with our teacher as to how we could refine and improve elements further as a whole narrative.

Everyone in our group had spent the past week trying to find certain assets that could be add to the different time period based scenes from furniture, applicances and other decorations.

Everyone in the group then added all of their assets to these different scenes and spent some time merging them into one singular scene with each apartment containing these different assets ready for the user testing stage of the experience. Some more time will need to be spent finalising our choices and also making sure that we have enough changes to make the scenes obvious or noticable for the user in our testing stage.

I had chosen to work on the 1990s version of the apartment and so now that everyone in the group has an apartment prefab to work on I can solely focus and work on the 1990s apartment to find assets and research regarding this particular time period.

Museum of the Home Inspiration

A couple of weeks ago our group went to the museum of the home which was fully explained in one of my previous blog posts. However one of the great things about visiting the museum was that they had an apartment from 1990s Britain which was great and so I took as many pictures as I could to inspire my choice in assets for my environment interior design.

Other research of 1990s British Apartments

Finding Assets and Models

After my research and photos found from the 1990s apartments I started to look on the unity asset store as well as other websites such as turbosquid, Sketchfab and freemodel etc. to find the closest resemblance to 1990s furniture that I could to try and recreate this style.

I started by finding more obvious assets such as a sofa, chairs, lamps, rugs and other elements for the living room. I then started to look how i could find some electronic appliances for the kitchen like a fridge, microwave, toaster, kettle and other elements etc. Then one very stand out asset would be the television set and also finding a 1990s computer which of course have greatly changes and evolved over time and so these should stand out a lot to the user.

Populating the Environment

Now that I had assembled a folder of all the different assets I started to populate the environment using my collected assets which overall was quite interesting to do. However while all of these assets worked well for simply creating a research iteration test of different users noticing or viewing objects from different time periods I would need to find a lot more assets and decorations to fill out the environment to truly immerse the player within that time period if it works correctly. Lighting and textures will also be very important for creating the general tone and mood of the environment while we also need to figure out either creating a skybox, having outside assets or simply having blinds or curtains over the windows.

After creating the initial Base environments That overall worked very well I wanted to make sure that these felt realistic to a real life apartment but also the correct size for a player to want to explore and see different areas of the apartments.

One of the problems could be making the environments a lot smaller so that they could perhaps more resemble an apartment that would be realistic for someone to have lived in but to also make it large enough to warrant the need for exploration and movement for gameplay.

Updates and Changes to the Layout

Initially when we were trying to create an apartment for our experience we found a really great low Polly asset pack which contained everything you would need to create a household setting. The pack consisted of doors, walls, floors and other interior items from Kitchenware to Living area but we needed to think more logistically about how we were going to create this apartment through time.

Some of the wall layouts were adjusted to change some of the general room sizes and layouts because before it was suggested after talking to Lin and Iris that the apartment might be a bit too large in scale. The overall layout of the apartment was then slightly shrunk down further which I think worked great overall.

Four XR Rigs

After working on the general layouts of the apartment I then tried adding four different XR rigs into the environments. This was quite simple in practice so i just created an XR rig and scaled it accordingly to the environment and this was then duplicated and placed into the other three environments so each one was its own standalone level. I then viewed each environment using the Virtual reality headset and overall everything seemed to work well and viewed fine other than of course not having any official lighting or textures but for initial tests this works well.

Environments Teleportation

One of the initial ideas and concepts for this experience that was shown to us by Herman was having all of the different apartments present in one scene. This concept would allow the player to seamlessly transition into the different Virtual apartments by turning on and off different XR rigs which the player wouldn’t notice the changes in levels.

The main concept for our experience is to change the time period or level using medicines as a trigger but for the first research iterations we will just have it based on the player pressing a trigger or another button which will trigger a random change.

Exporting Environment Packages

Now that the environment layout and design is mostly finished We now needed to make sure that we could continue to work on this project individually without needing to constantly update and communicate any changes or updates etc. So I felt that the easiest way to do this was by exporting the environment/apartment as a prefab package so that lin and Iris could work and populate their environments with the assigned time periods that we had chosen.

I had chosen to work on the 90s layout, Lin had chosen to work on the 80s Layout while Iris chose to work on the future environment. I didn’t mind creating the modern day layout for the tests since not much research would be required since we currently know what the current furnishings of an apartment are like! The research and imagery that we collected from the museum of the home will also be extremely helpful for this next stage and process for the project.

Creating the different environments in Unity

I have spent the past few days working on the environment design and layout in Unity and Iris found this great asset pack that will work great for designing and creating the environments that we need

Using these different assets i started to create an apartment layout based on my original sketches and ideas.

Differentiating the Test Environments

To make the environments different at this initial stage before we change to move of the furniture and interior design of each room I thought it would be simpler to change the colours and materials to show a stronger different in each area for the tests on transitions through time

Experimentation with teleporting/transition through ‘time’

The four Apartment layouts were then laid out like in the image below and four different XR interaction rigs were placed in the different environments so we could test triggering turning one off and another one on so the player can move between these freely using the medicine bottle trigger in the final version as planned.

Museum of the Home (Research)

After out meeting this week we arranged to go to the Museum of the home which we thought would be great as inspiration and research to see different interior design and architecture of homes over the years.

Research Question Ideas

We started to develop some ideas for the questions that we can ask during the research iteration to gain research and insight into how the player feels and what they see while playing the concept for our overall experience as shown below.

Searching for time period assets online

All of us spent some time during this week trying to find assets online based on some research and imagery we found to try and get the most accurate representation that we could of apartments through the different times which we found is going to be a lot more difficult than we thought especially when only using free to use assets online.

After this weeks meeting which also took place on Saturday and will most likely be this day over the coming weeks on this project we further discussed project ideas and developments.

Unity Environment Tests/Drafts

After drawing out some initial drafts/concepts for the environment I began to make some basic mock ups in unity to see how it might look and how the layout could work after the continue to develop and work on the narrative and gameplay over the coming weeks of the project.

How the player might transition through different times

Setting Age and time periods

The brief requires us to create a non-linear narrative and and so we wanted to make sure that the user could transition between the different ages at any random choice they want and be able to travel between these ages when and where they want as well to have complete freedom of choice but we wanted to make sure that the player always starts in the same place and there is always an ending thats the same but how you get there is up to the users journey and the player.

Interior Design over decades

One of the biggest aspects of our story concept is having different time periods and ages that the player will explore and since the whole experience will take place in one singular apartment over time, it is only natural that the apartments interior design and decor would change in each level.

Further Ideas for Augmented Reality App

We all agreed that the idea of creating a face filter would be very interesting for this experience and would work perfectly as a companion piece. The story and concept would involve the player mostly going to the bathroom to take the medicine to travel to different time periods and of course this would probably be in the cabinet with a mirror. After discussing we thought it would be interesting to always have the mirror blurred in the AR experience so the focus is the gameplay rather than what the player looks like.

Then for the player to see what the character looks like after taking each medicine bottle, they can use the AR app filter to view the different ages and looks of the character. There was also the idea and concept of the memories being blurred like how eyes would possibly become weaker and harder to see at an older age.

First Group Meeting

Last saturday myself, Iris and Lin had our first group meeting in the libray to discuss the project and to further develop our ideas and agree on our expectations and what we would all live to achieve with this non-linear narrative.

Story Ideas and Development

We all agreed that it would be very interesting to trying and show the main character of the plot at different stages and ages of his life. We began to find inspirations and discuss various media that had these types of stories or concepts in them. We discussed Video games such as To the Moon which allows an old man to relive his memories from different points in his life and Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, About Time, The girl who leapt through time etc. that all were quite similar in these kinds of topics

Narrowing Down the story concept

During the meeting we had many ideas and exciting plans for experience which would be great but we realised that we would need to dial it back to be something that is achieveable for us to create within the time that is given to us under our deadline. So we had the idea to have the entire experience set inside one single apartment that the player will explore over the chracters life at different stages in their life. This means that one environment can be created and replicated multiple times with certain differences to then create four different scenes or areas for the player to discover and explore.

We were thinking that perhaps their could be three or four different ages and this way we could tell and interesting and cohesive story because having less than this may not work very well as a full narrative if you only travel to one other time period. The environments being simpler as well means that we feel this is achievable and in the time frame given in the deadline.

World/Environment Layout

After out meeting and discussing the different ideas for the game I started to spend some evenings sketching out ideas for the enviornment and how the player could transition from one place to the next. I also wrote down some rough age ideas of the charactert starting at 70 and then perhaps being a child at 12, in his twenties and in his forties which is of course something that we will figure out and discuss over time as the narrative takes form.

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Augmented Reality Idea (Cross Media)

This particular module requires us to make a cross-media experience which will require to different platforms to be considered. While we definately have decided we would like to work in Virtual Reality for the main aspect of the experience we started to look into how Augmented Reality could be incorporated as a cross-media element to our story.

In one of our classes this week we sat down with our lecturer to discuss our ideas and one idea that was suggested due to the concept of having the player being able to age through time was to use an AR face filter which would let the player see themselves at those different ages or points in life using a mobile phone. This could then work great to being a companion piece that can either be used during the experience or extra story, imagery or information could also be shown through this AR application for the story.

Finding Group Members

During one of our briefing sessions and seminars for this project we were put together with different members of our group online to discuss the project and the different ideas that we initially had. During this session I talked to Lin who thought it would be interesting to create a detective story with brancing narratives which i also felt would be interesting having to incover secrets and mysteries around the environment. After this session I also began to talk to other coursemates to see what ideas they had and I have now chosen to work with Lin and Wanting to work on this project further based on some initial interests and ideas that we were all discussing. We have arranged to have a meeting over the weekend to discuss what we would all like to achieve for this project.

Project Ideas and Concepts

During some of our initial discussions over the passed few days we shared some of the different ideas or concepts that we have been thinking about individually to see what each other think of the different ideas. In one of the classes one of the ideas that stood out was Lin’s idea of creating a type of adaptation or idea based on ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’ which is a story about a man who ages backwards and the full narrative shows his entire life from birth to death of that character.

While we initially started to discuss this topic, this then developed into an idea of the player being able to play through the life of a character and see different points of their life at different ages. This idea could relate really well to Virtual Reality because of the interactions and gameplay that could be involved such as moving slower than normal at an older age or of course seeing the world at shorter height if the character is a child during the experience. We all agreed to think further of these concepts to discuss later in our first meeting for the project.

Project Briefing

This week we were briefed on another group project for the Critical Practice and Exploration module in which we are required to develop a story concept and XR experience that explores a non-linear narrative structure through cross-platform immersive media. For the cross platform aspect of the project we can combine together concepts for VR, AR, browser based content or mixed reality etc. We are also required to work in groups of 2-3 members from our class to complete this project by the June deadline.

Initial Ideas for Non-Linear Experience

After we were briefed i started to write down some different ideas on my own to see what could be created for this particular type of project:

• Concept where one person plays an experience in Virtual reality while another person interacts with the experience through augmented reality and possibly finding clues, hints and informaiton for the VR player to be able to progress through the rest of the experience or there could be branching narratives that can only be triggered or accessed through the AR component creating a strongly co-operative experience.
• Science Fiction Mystery/Detective style story which utilises entering a digital VR space with using a AR based device to look at clues and hints to progress forward the narrative, possibly linking clues together which can result in different story paths or endings for the mystery and what happened in this situation.
• Scanning different objects and items in AR around the real world environment which will trigger an even or choice in a Virtual Reality Experience.
• The environment in VR could be based on reversed objects that changes the whole look of the environment and they can only be revealed through a cross platform such as AR or a browser so the player could unknowingly pick up or trigger objects that can only be seen fully through the external applicaiton. This could create a sense of mystery and choice where the story that has been chosen can only be revealed at the end
• Mystery game which takes place in a metaverse or digital world where you need to enter through a computer as a programme to solve the problem and interact with other computer programmes and some characters to solve the solution so its like a puzzle game and you can use AR or a blog to solve the issues or problems – you can possibly communicate with an Aritificial intelligence
• In vr the player steps through TV screens or film reels and actually enters a black and white film, or different films through the ages. Each one can be in different screen formats, have scratches, sounds and acoustics of the times and all sorts this could be a museum idea for curated old films scenes or a story could be told such as a person trying to learn who their grandfather was who was a filmmaker and finding out about their personalty and life through his films he made
• Time Travel Story which lets you visit different ages of life and you can see how old you are using a face filter to identify the character current age at the time of the level
• Time loop story where you need to explore and escape or find out the myster in a certain time frame otherwise you might die and you can view or see what you uncovered in virtual reality before you enter that area again to see what went wrong – similar concept to Twelve Minutes or 60 seconds – doomsday timeloop game – has to pass through 2 levels in the given time or theres one level and then spawn in the other