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Week 7 – February 28

Written by

Nellie Tonev

in

Overview

  • Halves Presentation
  • Design Progress
  • Playtest Night
  • Tree-Chopping Mechanic
  • Art & UI Assets
  • Challenges
  • Next Week’s Goals

Halves Presentation

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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

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