August 28th, 2023 – September 3rd, 2023
We are very excited to start the semester and work on the Animals and Climate Change project. It’s been three months since we’ve seen each other and we are really looking forward to getting back together to work on this game. We are a team of 5, along with our faculty advisors, Shirley Saldamarco and Heather Kelley and for this project, we will be focused on developing a VR experience where player will embody an animal to help to learn about the climate-related challenges.
Listed below is the narrative that we were given in our proposal from our client:
Narrative
People are fascinated by what it would be like to be another animal, such as a bird or a dolphin. This natural curiosity can be used to draw people into a virtual reality experience that educates them about the effects of climate change while they are having fun.
Meeting Our Clients
We had the pleasure of meeting our project clients, Laurie Heller and Diane Turnshek. Their enthusiasm for the project was contagious, and their experience and insights promise to be invaluable in the coming weeks.
They shared the full proposal of the game idea along with research that talks about how the experience of being an animal in VR can help create more understanding and empathy with the goal that this can lead to the player taking actionable steps to help.
Production
The team production tool will be a combination of Jira, Google Calendar, and Google Drive.
We have separated our roles, and our team cohesion is now quite clear and robust.
Design
After discussing what our client had in mind for this project, we brainstormed several different design ideas based on the project description, which encompassed embodying both a hawk and a dolphin. Both of these species were chosen by our clients because they felt that people would enjoy being able to do things like flying or echolocation, making it enjoyable and memorable experience and to better understand the different challenges they face.
Some of the climate change issues that we are considering for our project:
Figure1 : Red Tide in Florida
Figure 2: Clear cut forest
Programming
After carefully considering the choice between Unreal Engine 5 and Unity as our game engine, we have decided to utilize UE5 due to its superior physics and interaction capabilities, optimization tool and the visual scripting capabilities of Bluprint. More research will be done for the next couple weeks because UE5 is a strong but complicated engine that we have never used before.
