On Tuesday (April 29th), we gave our final presentation, which was live-streamed and recorded (linked below):
Wrap-Up and Next Steps
With that, our project semester comes to a close, and our team is celebrating our success! We delivered on a complete build and scoped gameplay experience that explores interesting elements of augmented reality as well as how to translate historical information into interactive AR. We sent our product to the team at the Portals Project (the Brownsville Perennial Project) that provided us with a model of Searights Tollhouse. They were very pleased and enthusiastic about our work, calling it a compelling application of Digital Preservation technology.
Moving forward, our website and Google Drive repository will serve as an archive of our work that future related projects at the ETC can reference. Additionally, we will send our work to the other historical organizations that we visited, such as the National Road Museum and Searights Tollhouse. Finally, we are considering working toward publishing our APK officially on the Google Play store for an easier download process.
Overall, the team is very proud of our work, and this semester was a great learning experience for all of us.
After Soft Opening, some of the feedback we received was that players did not feel a strong connection to the actions they were taking or have a good understanding of their motivations. While we used a quest-driven format like many games, many players made remarks along the lines of “Why can’t these characters do this work themselves?” Players felt like they were just doing favors for other characters for no particular reason, and since our experience is so short, and we cannot show a lot of text on a phone screen in a game meant to be played outside, it is difficult to establish an emotional connection to the NPCs.
As a result, we made some major edits to the progression of the story. Previously, the player started out in front of the tollhouse and collects some tolls to clear out a traffic delay since the tollhouse keeper is sick. Afterward, they were prompted to find the doctor, whose wagon got stuck in the mud, and help his wagon get freed (by flattening out the uneven road), so he can make it to the tollhouse. We knew we wanted to edit the interaction on the wagon scene because several players commented that they didn’t really understand how flattening the road could directly be freeing the wagon, and they wished they could directly push the wagon.
Scene of the doctor’s wagon stuck in the muddy terrain
We then asked a new question: “Why do you need to be helping another person free their wagon? Why can’t it be your wagon stuck in the mud, and you are getting help from the NPCs, rather than the other way around?” This framing gives players a much more understandable motivation for the actions they are taking and addresses the comments above.
Wagon stuck in the mud
Now, players start in the muddy road scene, where they see their wagon stuck deep in the mud. To guide the player and give instructions, we brought back the beloved talking horse (which previously we couldn’t find a good, logical use for). They will try to flatten out the terrain and then push the back of the wagon, but to no avail. Then, the doctor will walk by on his way to the tollhouse and invite you to follow him and seek more people to help there. We also prefer moving the tollhouse scene from first to second because the tollhouse scene is more visually appealing than the barren muddy road, as it has more interesting 3D models, characters, and environment art. Like before, players will collect some tolls from travelers while the doctor helps the tollhouse workers. After that, we added in one more scene in AR, which has the players go to a forest area with some trees and a logger, who the player will also recruit to help push their wagon. First, they will be asked to chop down three trees, which the logger will turn into wood planks, since historically parts of the National Road were paved with wood planks for a smoother traveling experience. Finally, the player will return to their wagon and can push it free with the help of the characters they met.
Scene with the logger and wood planks collected from chopping trees
Transitions into AR Scenes
As mentioned last week, one issue that we needed to address after Soft Opening was that the player could be looking in any direction when they spawn the scene, but Unity’s terrain is rigid and cannot be rotated. This means that if we just spawn the scene, all of the important objects could spawn behind the player, which is a major source of confusion.
The initial version that we built in Week 12 proved to be functional, so we spent time this week refining the UI to make the user experience smoother. If the player is not in the exact spot they need to stand, we tell them where they need to go with a glowing cylinder on the ground. Then, once they are in position, rather than forcing the players to point their phone to the ground to see what direction they need to look, we added new instructions telling them which direction to turn, based on which way is closer to the target direction (hooray for linear algebra).
Throughout the semester, we have also been encountering some technical issues that stem from how Niantic’s package detects the ground. Sometimes, the the bottom of the scene isn’t accurately aligned to the ground, and at times, the scene will fly off into the distance (we’re still not sure exactly why this happens; it seems that for some reason the phone thinks the player is moving rapidly, possibly caused by some irregular movement or shaking of the phone). Since we cannot directly solve these issues by the end of the semester, we added in a “rescan” button that just lets the player reset where the ground shows up.
On Wednesday, our team had our soft opening session, where faculty members had the opportunity to play through our game experience outside and provide feedback on our progress as well as suggestions for improvements and polishing to do before finals. Here is our demo video recording:
Overall, our Soft Opening went well! While it was pretty cold outside in the morning, we had pretty good weather for our outdoor experience, considering it was raining during the following days when other teams had their softs. We tried playing indoors a couple of times, hoping that the lobby would be enough open space for the game to work, but we ran into a lot of technical issues indoors (likely due to the accuracy of the ground detection and the presence of walls). After that, we moved outside for all of the remaining sessions, where the build was very stable on the technical side, and our guests could play through the entire experience. For anyone who didn’t want to go outside, we showed the demo video recording above, so they could still provide feedback on our progress.
Synthesizing Feedback
The biggest pieces of feedback and suggestions for improvement can be summarized by three broad categories:
Historical Context: Players are curious to learn even more about the setting and the historical motivations for their actions in the story. While it is understood that there is a lot of tension between adding in even more content and simultaneously limiting the amount of text on screen to keep it readable, we should find opportunities to fit in as much historical information as possible. Some of it should be optional information on the map, which the player can engage with at will, and the most important pieces should be integrated into the narrative, dialogue, and the players’ actions, which is where the player is paying the most attention. Additionally, some of this context can be provided outside of our application, such as on our project website, or by linking the players to external resources, such as the National Road Museum.
Making the AR interactions less abstract: For the most part, the current interactions of collecting tolls and smoothing out the dirt to free a wagon feel engaging and satisfying to complete. However, at the moment, they feel somewhat divorced from the historical, real-life actions that someone at the time would take to tend to the National Road. Some players expressed an interest in mapping the road flattening interaction to a more direct action, such as filling holes with rocks, or pushing the wagon out of the mud directly.
User Experience (improve how easy it is to figure out what to do): Several players feel hesitant or stuck while playing because they do not have an easy or obvious way to know what exactly they should be doing at any given moment. Adding an idle timer to show some instructions, along with updating the quest system and quest log to show more details about the tasks, should address many of the issues in this section.
Build Updates
In preparation for softs and in response to feedback, here are some additional updates and improvements we made to the build this week:
We implemented the animation for one NPC who walks alongside cattle, pulling one along by a rope.
We created an introductory story that gives the player some historical context before they start the game in the tollhouse scene. This went through a couple of iterations so that the art style would fit the historical time period, and we have plans to expand this to a longer introductory scene to provide more historical context.
Intro Story UI (Version 1)
Intro Story UI (Version 2, adjusted to better match the time period)
To address the issue of players sometimes spawning into the scene facing the opposite direction of where the main characters and focal points of the scene are, we updated the transition into AR scenes, so that there is an arrow on the ground prompting the player as to where to stand and what direction they need to look before the scene will spawn. While this is currently still unwieldy and difficult to see because it requires the player to point their phones directly downward, this is a major improvement that solves many of our previous challenges, so we will continue to refine and improve it for the final version.
We created avatars for the NPCs that show up in the dialogue panel.
Finally, we created a 3D model for a mile marker, which we will allow the player to look at and walk around in AR at the end of the experience.
Challenges
The main challenge for this week was picking which feedback from Soft Opening to pursue, and what improvements to prioritize for the rest of the semester, as the final build and final presentation loom just around the corner. We still have some additional content to add in terms of the narrative, and there is a lot of polish needed to make the project as strong as possible. There are some technical issues and bugs that we need to mitigate, primarily making sure that the player cannot get stuck in our experience with no way to proceed other than resetting. Sometimes, this is from flaws in our logic, and when we allow players to switch scenes. Other times, this comes from AR tech errors, where the AR scenes will slide or fly away for no apparent reason. While we believe this is a problem with the Niantic Spatial package and how the ground is being detected, we at least need to mitigate this problem by allowing players to reset where the scene spawns without losing all of their progress. Also, some of the characters look very dark against their background, and we are figuring out ways that we can make them pop out more, especially when the background is very bright, like on a sunny day.
Next Week’s Goals
Refine the experience design to take into account the feedback from Soft Opening
Adjust the interactions with the National Road to make them feel more meaningful to the player
Integrate historical content and finalize the story, so that UI can be created
Update the quest system to include the player’s goals and better guide them
Test the newest build at playtest night on main campus
On Saturday, we welcomed several groups of playtesters, including some young children, students ranging from middle school through college, and some ETC faculty, to try out our experience.
Playtesters looking at AR scene during ETC Playtest Day
We received very valuable feedback from our guests about what worked well in our prototype, and what could be improved. In general, players strongly felt the time period that our app was placing them in, and they were interested in that setting and history. One of our primary areas for improvement is better guiding the player, so they know what their goals are and don’t feel stuck or confused in the scenes when our team is not around to nudge them. We plan to flesh out the game’s quest system and integrate more UI and dialogue that will make the player experience clearer and smoother. Additionally, guests wanted more chances to dive deeper and learn more about the real historical context of the National Road. We had some of that present in our map scene, as players could click on an information icon and see a pop-up with some facts about the toll house building, though we will continue to add even more historical content in order to create a richer experience.
Gameplay Design Updates
In our build at Playtest Day, the player starts out in a scene with the toll house building and a couple of NPCs whom they can talk to, who will inform them of their task, which was to help someone whose wagon got stuck in the mud a little farther down the road. They could smooth out and flatten the road around the traveler’s wagon and then watch it drive away.
After playtesting, we felt that the first scene was not interactive enough, and that talking to the NPCs did not fully take advantage of the setting and historical context of the toll house. Since we had copies of actual historical records relating to the rates of tolls on the National Road from Searights Tollhouse, we designed a new interaction in that scene where several traveling NPCs come one at a time, and the player must charge them the correct toll amount, so that they may proceed. This new scene also showcases the variety in the kinds of travelers along the road, as some travel by foot with cattle, others have a full wagon pulled by horses, and so on.
Historical Rates of Toll (Searights Tollhouse)In-game UI for selecting the toll rates
Additionally, we want our story to tackle how people at the time fixed and developed the road. Often, they paved the roads with wood planks, so we added a third scene in AR that utilizes our existing tree chopping mechanic from earlier in the semester and has the player chop down a couple of trees and hand the logs to an NPC who will convert them to wood planks.
Though we originally wanted to have some kind of scene rendered in AR which takes place in a town, with some more of our Wild West-themed building, we realized that having a whole town was not really enhancing our story, and we could tell a simple and complete narrative just along the roadside near the tollhouse (which in real life is not extremely close to other buildings). This decision also mitigates the issue of players wanting to walk into decorative buildings in AR when all of the interactions are outside, as we will now focus primarily on showing the characters and how they traveled, rather than many life-scale buildings. Having said that, wherever we can (such as in our intro and outro stories that serve as on-boarding and off-boarding of the experience), we will still showcase as much as possible of the history of the development of towns along the National Road.
Artwork & UI Integration
To create more diversity in the characters traveling on the National Road, we now have the animation for cattle walking, along with one NPC who is traveling on foot with some cattle.
Cattle walk cycle animation
We also added UI indicators showing how to interact with the road in order to flatten it, since some players did not immediately understand the interaction purely from reading the dialogue.
In-game UI instructions for flattening the road
Dialogue & Historical Content
One area where we can add a lot of educational and historical information is in our map scene, as players can click on information icons to trigger a “Did You Know?” pop-up connected to specific areas of the map and learn more about the context of this experience outside of the AR scenes and interactions. We have drafts for several of these to integrate around the tollhouse and the road, as well as the design of the pop-ups:
To grapple with the issues surrounding reading on a phone screen—especially outdoors—while still providing an engaging narrative, we simplified the dialogue. We restricted the player character to only having one dialogue option, which makes the dialogue proceed faster and makes the text on screen much more readable. The UI for the dialogue was adjusted to make it easier for the players to see what their character is responding to the NPCs, and we made sure to make each statement in the dialogue concise, so the font could remain bigger. The updated narrative and dialogue options reflect all of these adjustments.
More legible UI for players’ responses to dialogueDialogue between player character (in brackets) and an NPC Dialogue options for NPCs in the toll-collecting scene based on what rate the player selects
Challenges:
The biggest challenge of the week to tackle was prioritizing the most crucial tasks and making a plan for what changes to make that would be the most impactful for Soft Opening. Additionally, in response to playtesting feedback, we needed to come up with a strong plan regarding how to guide players in AR to perform intended actions and have a smooth user experience. For example, how can we prevent them from walking into the decorative world-scale tollhouse building model? On the tech and user experience design side, we also needed to figure out how to ensure that the terrain shows up in an expected position and that we provided players with smooth transitions in and out of AR.
Next Steps:
Iterating on our build and delivering intermediate builds before Soft Opening on Wednesday, April 9th
Stabilizing the spawning of the AR scenes as much as possible
Integrating more animations and models to make more diverse, unique, and interesting NPCs
Fleshing out the map with more historical content and making it properly responsive to player’s actions and quests
Enhancing and polishing the new AR scene of chopping down trees and making wood planks to pave the road
Adding sound effects and more story elements like a brief slideshow of photos and notes at the beginning that provide context to the experience
To address the issues with how the open area in which we expect players to use our app is not large enough to render an entire town, we have decided to split the experience into multiple AR scenes that each contain a small chunk of the environment. For Playtest Day, we decided to build out one scene at the tollhouse and one that is a refined version of the road flattening and wagon freeing interaction scene that we have been developing for the past couple of weeks. In the future, we plan to add one more scene which is something in the town (still undecided exactly where or what interaction).
To move between the AR scenes, we are creating a non-AR (3D game) view of the town that players can traverse by swiping left and right. There, they can click on NPCs, get additional information and descriptions of the buildings, or go into select AR views for our AR interactions.
Playtest Day Build
We implemented a quest system to keep track of the player’s state and the tasks they have completed, as well as manage the game flow.
Additionally, we implemented a prototype of the non-AR map described in the updated game design, with all of the aforementioned features:
Implementing the map also involved creating a new terrain and layout, as well as the UI icons shown.
The animations for all of the human models have also been fully integrated:
Last but certainly not least, we also have an app icon now!
Challenges
Through playtesting, we have noticed a couple of glaring technical bugs based on how the Niantic package detects where the ground is as well as how the players move their phones around. These largely include the scale of rendered objects not being consistent or accurate, especially getting messed up if there’s an incline (though for the sake of this project, we can choose to only demo and have people play the experience on a flat surface). Sometimes the scene does not spawn where we think the ground is, so we plan to add in a way to preview where the scene will show up before having it spawn. Additionally, we still want to find a way to control whether the player is looking in the correct direction and spawns in a good location in the scene.
Next Week’s Goals
Synthesize feedback from ETC playtest day and decide on the highest-priority goals to achieve before soft opening and finals week
Iterate on the current build at least a couple times to get additional playtesting feedback from Mike and other faculty members or students before creating our finalized Softs build
This week, the majority of the team attended Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, but we still made some progress and updated our prototype in preparation for ETC Playtest Day.
Demo
We iterated on last week’s demo for smoothing out the road to free a wagon from the mud, and early this week, we playtested the updated build with Mike and Jonathan.
Overall, the interactions were intuitive and felt satisfying, especially compared to previous iterations. They appreciated our new animations (see below), as characters now wave the player over to catch their attention and prompt the player to initiate dialogue.
Moving forward, the main area to improve upon is adding in guidance for how to complete the quest.
Art Updates
We added in decorative grass textures to both the tollhouse terrain and the terrain for the scene for flattening the road and freeing the wagon.
The human characters now all have rigs (apart from their faces, which need more time to rig for dialogue), as well as waving animations, which have been integrated into the prototype to catch players’ attention and make the scene look more dynamic overall.
Challenges
The main challenge for this week was just making sure we had a clear plan, goals, and schedule to keep making good progress on the project and keep up momentum in spite of GDC.
Next Week’s Goals
Integrate an additional AR scene using the tollhouse into the build
Prepare a plan for playtesting and a build for ETC Playtest Day
In all honesty, our Halves presentation did not go very well. Many faculty members expressed concerns that the current design feels underdeveloped, there is a lack of depth in execution, and there is still a lot to do to deliver a complete and engaging experience.
Going forward and looking toward a strong finish to the semester despite the slower-than-ideal start, we will aim to have a good product for ETC Playtest Day on March 29th, which we can iterate upon and improve for Soft Opening the week of April 7th, and then once again for finals week.
We came up with an updated experience design (detailed below), so for the next couple of weeks, the team will be focused on building out a solid level to test and iterate upon.
New Design Direction
In order to pivot after Halves to a stronger direction, we came up with the following pitch for a gameplay experience:
Overview: The player is someone who grew up traveling west across the National Road during their early adult years. The narrative showcases their memories of their life on the road, with the main experience focusing on when they were passing through a town (based on western Pennsylvania) in the early 1840s.
Changing the player from someone who lives in the town and manages the toll house to a traveler makes it easier to have the characters introduce themselves and more naturally act like strangers because the player character doesn’t know them either (with the exception maybe of the player’s wife/family or horse, for example). In the alternative, we would need to establish some relationship between the NPCs and the player, and it doesn’t make sense that the player has to learn how to do their job that they’ve been doing for many years.
Before the experience (onboarding): The player sees a slideshow or photo book that details some of the history prior to the era of the main gameplay, which is ~1840.
Main gameplay: The player gets to explore a relatively busy town with buildings like a tavern, grocery store, and tollhouse. They are passing through and need to pay their toll, but there is a delay because the tollhouse keeper is sick or busy for some other reason that day. Their goal is to explore the town and help the NPCs, eventually clearing up the holdup at the tollhouse, so they can continue their travels.
Some of the actions/verbs that the players can engage in (we will pick only a couple to focus on):
Talking with people in the town and learning their stories (narrative quests)
Chopping trees (or firewood)
Buying items at the store
Interacting with animals (feeding, talking)
Cooking (ingredients in a pot over a fire, smokehouses & smoking meat)
Picking up objects to move around or give to NPCs
Fixing a broken-down wagon or helping an injured horse
After the experience (off-boarding): The player will see their character’s remaining memories in a similar fashion to the “before” section. This will cover how the 1850s saw the rise of trains that made the National Road less used, but then with new transportation like bikes and cars, it had some resurgence. We will end on a hopeful note about how the road may not be super busy or crucial to life at the moment, but it is still important to learn about and remember its impact.
Breakthrough: Terrain & New AR Interaction
This week, we prototyped a new interaction that feels far more promising than anything that we have come up with prior, and which thematically fits in with the National Road very well. Using Unity’s built-in terrain system, we can set up an uneven terrain object with a mud-like material and have the player swipe on their screen to smooth out the terrain. This mechanic is very exciting because the interaction makes sense and feels good, and this new terrain looks really good compared to what we had been able to achieve before!
Screenshot of dirt road terrainDemo interaction of flattening the road terrain
We also implemented some less significant mechanics like allowing players to pick up objects and enforcing a landscape orientation on the phone.
Challenges
This new design direction still comes with its fair share of challenges and limitations to overcome or work around! For one, the due to how Unity’s terrain is set up, a terrain object cannot be rotated. This means it is not very compatible with the current approach of spawning an AR scene in a specific orientation in front of the player. Since the terrain has a specific absolute orientation when spawned (even though it can be translated to a new position or scaled), this means players might spawn facing the wrong way, clipped into objects, etc. We have been brainstorming ways to work around this and have not come up with a solution quite yet, but that is a major priority.
As for limitations with the new design in general, we are at a bit of an awkward place with the amount of open space that we want our experience to be playable within. So far, we have been testing for the game to be playable in open areas that are around 15×20 meters in area. This is a pretty big space to walk around, but at the same time, it is incredibly small when we are talking about simulating a town. We cannot realistically render an entire town in that space; at most, only one building makes sense to be placed in an area that is around the size of the grass lawn outside of the Entertainment Technology Center building.
Next Week’s Goals
Refine and playtest the new terrain scene and quest for freeing a wagon from the broken road
On Friday, we had our Halves presentation, linked below (we were the first group of the day):
Design Progress
The design that we decided to pursue has three chapters:
First, the player begins in a dense forest where they have to cut trees to clear a path, reminiscent of the earliest phases of the National Road, when people who were given land out west contributed to building the road in order to reach their properties. The main mechanic is chopping down trees so that the player and their horse can make it through. The reward for achieving the goal is witnessing the formation of a town along the National Road that the player will continue to foster the development of.
After reaching chapter 2, which is the core part of the experience, players become the keeper of a toll house. This phase reflects the point in history at which the road has been mostly constructed and there is frequent commerce and traffic. Their primary goal is to collect tolls to raise money for road maintenance and further development. They can see life-sized animals and wagons passing by and interact with them in the AR view.
Eventually, the player is rewarded for their work as the toll house keeper with reaching the final stage of the experience, which is the developed town. They will be able to walk around and have an immersive experience in the 19th century, with more characters and animals moving around that can be interacted with and will teach the player about the stories of the time. The overall experience design was created to emphasize elements that require walking around and looking without extremely complicated mechanics, since this is what AR is best suited for.
For the Halves demo video, we implemented a sample game loop where the player must clear enough trees in front of their horse to create a path, and they succeed when the horse crosses the entire area:
Playtest Night
In preparation for the Halves presentation, we tested an updated build earlier this week to get more feedback on how the tree-chopping interaction felt. Compared to what we had last week, the additional particle effects and sound effects were a great addition, and players enjoyed using the tap interaction (with the axe) to chop down trees. The swiping interaction needs more polish.
Also, players wanted a clear, larger goal for the game. Right now, with only the scene for chopping trees, it felt like there were too many trees that required too much effort to chop, and they did not want to play for an extended amount of time.
Tree-Chopping Mechanic
Here is an up-close look at the updated tree chopping interactions and the added particle effects:
Chopping Tree Interaction: Tap for Axe
Chopping Tree Interaction: Swipe for Saw
Art & UI Assets
From our previous prototypes, we had seen that trying to render the dirt road using a material on the ground meshes generated by Niantic’s spatial platform resulted in a very choppy and broken-looking ground, which looked more like broken wood than dirt. This week, we created a new dirt material that we could render onto a flat plane, which we could position onto the ground based on the positions of the (now invisible) semantic layer meshes. This new material uses a position-based shader to generate depth and a textured appearance.
Original dirt texture on rendered meshes (looked broken and unrealistic)Updated dirt material on a flat surface that uses a shader to add depth and texture
We now also have models and textures for the tools needed to chop the trees.
Models and textures for the tools used to chop down trees
For the UI, we have created a draft introductory panel based on an old newspaper, as well as gesture prompts showing how to chop trees. The gesture prompts were drawn with work gloves on as to not be exclusionary of any race of gender.
UI Prototypes for Halves
Challenges
The challenges for this week were largely just putting together a coherent demo and presentation that effectively showed our efforts up until this point in the semester and that incorporated everyone’s work. As it’s still winter, we also had to work around the weather quite a bit this week when testing and recording demos.
Next Week’s Goals
Process feedback from Halves presentation and determine goals for the rest of the second half of the semester accordingly
The focus for this week was prototyping playable mechanics for playtest night in Weeks 6 and 7 leading up to Halves. On the backend, we first implemented manager scripts that manage the input processing on the phone, keeping track of when the player taps on the screen, as well as what kind of action they performed (a tap vs. a swipe).
As we moved away from the toll collecting mechanic from last week, the next gameplay mechanic that we prototyped was chopping down trees, which we wanted to allow players to do either by tapping (with an axe) or by swiping (with a saw). We implemented a working version of the prototype as well as a small demo scene that could be shown at playtest night.
We kept the dialogue system and wrote some test dialogue for the horse, as well as dialogue options that the player could choose in response. At the current stage of what we have, one interesting story direction that we want to follow is the idea of animals being treated differently than people (and being valued very highly) on the National Road. Our sample dialogue in our demo scene has the horse reflect on their comfortable sleeping conditions, while the human NPC talks about how stuffy and cramped is it when they stay at an inn or tavern along the road.
Finally, we made some improvements to the mechanic from last week of spawning an AR scene on top of the ground, based on the amount of ground that is actually detected in front of the player, and we assembled a sample town scene with the Wild West asset bundle buildings and some wagons that the player could explore.
Scanning and waiting until a minimum size of ground is detected by the Niantic Spatial package Rendering life-scale buildings in ARRendering moving objects (horses and wagon) in the scene
Playtest Night
We attended playtest night on Tuesday, where we showed our three demo scenes to players and had them try out all three core mechanics. From this session, we learned that players enjoyed the interaction of tapping to chop the trees, and they also thought the animation of the horse talking was entertaining. However, the dialogue was too long, making it difficult to read, and the interactions needed more visual feedback to be properly communicated.
Challenges
While the mechanics that we have implemented are functioning, they both have a lot of limitations and need to be strongly improved upon, especially visually. When rendering the big scene with many buildings outside, if there are other buildings or trees around, like in the area right in front of Hunt Library, the in-game environment will suffer from a lot of clipping due to occlusion. For the tree chopping scene, building for a mobile device means we are severely limited in the number of high-poly trees with branches that we can render. At the moment, players can look up and see that they are chopping down a lot of bare logs that are filling the space in a supposed thick forest.
Going into the week of halves, we also still have a lot to do ahead of us in terms of narrowing down a very specific direction and vision for what this project will become in the second half of the semester, and it has been challenging so far for us to find a path that seems particularly promising as an engaging and functioning experience that meets the project goals.
Next Week’s Goals
Iterate upon and refine a build for playtest night on main campus again next week
Polish a build, gameplay demo video, and slideshow for Halves presentation
