Overview
- Feedback from Halves & Looking Ahead
- New Design Direction
- Breakthrough: Terrain & New AR Interaction
- Challenges
- Next Week’s Goals
Feedback from Halves & Looking Ahead
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!
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