October 9th, 2023 – October 15th, 2023
Production
This week we were focused on getting ready for our Halves presentation and we also met with Elaine Fath again to discuss our game’s actionable steps. Since we are doing a transformational game, the question we always ask ourselves is what would we like the player to do after they complete the game. One of her suggestions was to consider giving the player 3 options, a small, medium and large step, which would allow them to choose how much they want to get involved. We will continue to explore this in the coming weeks.
Design
We have summarized the issues we encountered earlier. From a design perspective, we face the challenge of effectively portraying a long-term climate change issue within the constraints of a short VR game experience.
Our solution involves implementing a ‘time warp’ within the scene to vividly illustrate the process of climate change.
Art
Since we focused on preparing for our Halves, we spent time preparing renders to showcase our game experience in our presentation. We wanted to make sure that everyone had a visual to reference for each phase of the game. In particular, we showed the contrast between the color of the seawater environment engulfed by the red tide versus the deep blue open ocean, the way the player will see their dolphin pod, the beautiful and lush initial environment, and finally the mangrove restoration level.
Programming
We have made changes to our limited visibility to fit the limitations of the platform.
To solve this problem, we faked the fog using three layers.
And this is what it looks like in the game:
We have also separated our phases into different maps, so that they will not take too much time generating a big map.
We also add background music and sound effects such as eat fish sound into our game to make it more interesting.
More will be added into the game as we developed.