Overview
- Updated Story
- Transitions into AR Scenes
(work in progress)
Updated Story
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.
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.
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.
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.
