Overview
- Updated Game Design
- Playtest Day Build
- Challenges
- Next Week’s Goals
Updated Game Design
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