Personal aims and objectives
Recently, I was thinking about the relationships between colonization, races, resources competition and the development of both technology and social formation. For me, my narrative aim in designing this game is to tell a story, in which human beings are looking for new energies and therefore violate the spirits(named Oins)’ forest, but also leave some technology on how to use those energies to the Oins (during generations colonial). The players, as one of the Oins who’s kidnapped and forced to work for the human beings, by the end, can choose whether to do nothing and see it happens or to fight with the human beings with the technology that they learnt from them to protect their homeland.
As for the gameplay, we hope to make a mini immersive world for players to relatively freely explore and finish tasks, and gradually understand the storytelling during these processes.
And for the visual presentation, our VR groupmates would like to make a magic forest while I was thinking about the visual atmosphere of the First Industrial Revolution. We kept these two in two different scenes and combined them into our narrative aims in representing the two different races.
Critical Reflection
The game
I was not familiar with coding regarding VR. As a result, there were loads of hidden peril in my coding for the game. Some functions were realized in weird ways, which might cause unexpected problems in actual plays. For instance, in spite of DontDestroyObject, I used a weird method to allow players to move with objects between scenes- applying a trigger on the player’s body (as I didn’t know how to check if specific objects are grabbed by VR hands), and while the player triggering the object and the gate at the same time, enabling a same object by the position just in front of the player in the next scene.
Besides, there are different aspects regarding guiding players that need to be improved. Before, every time while playtesting, the designers would have to explain to the players how to act (teleport, grab items, …) with the device in person, even if those actions were commonly used in a lot of VR experiences. For most people, VR devices are non-necessary stuff compared with phones and computers, thus they are usually not familiar with using such devices.
We realized that by the last playtest, which was already very close to the final submission time. An initial scene was urgently added to give a tutorial on how to use the VR Oculus equipment, as well as provide an area for players to get familiar with it. It worked as expected in an extra playtest, but might not be the best way as we didn’t have time to think a lot about it. Guidance design concerning all possibilities of players getting stuck as well as introducing players to the game world should be considered at the very beginning next time.
By using the new-developed language and the vocal guide we’re trying to avoid stiff hints in the VR experience, but after it’s done some problems were raised. For instance, as all the sounds are played by VR devices this is not straightforward to ears like headphones, players might face difficulty getting all the things clear, plus player is able to move away from the NPCs at any time, which also decreases the opportunities for them to go through the whole narrative and get the information on how to play through.
More severely, for a more immersive VR experience, we didn’t make a UI system for players to check what they need to do easily by general language. The guidance relies almost totally on the audio dialogues. Once the players choose to ignore the NPCs’ voices, they will very probably lose their targets.
The project
Overall, we were trying to make a game that is more complex than what we can finely do in two months. As a result, loads of things had failed to meet the expectation. There were still several functional bugs left with the final submitted version, e.g., the Alchemy Matrix sometimes could but sometimes could not recognize the correct Plant Crystals (we speculated it’s a collider issue but didn’t have time to figure out), which might prevent the players from getting to the next step. Plenty of non-functional improvements are needed as well, e.g., 1. while speaking, the NPC’s head should be able to turn following the exact position of the players; 2. There should be a loading UI for a smoother experience while the players try to transfer from one scene to another.
Working with VR
This was my first time making a game-in-VR during which I realized there were differences in things that need to be considered between VR games and PC games, not merely the familiarity of players using devices, but, associated with this, more complex behaviours and expectations. For example, after getting familiar with the situation, the players who were new to VR tended to pay most attention first on teleporting through the whole map, trying to find all interactable objects in the scenes, whilst ignoring the background information like the animations and the sounds, which might cause confusion about how to accomplish the game. But this kind of players may feel satisfied with the pure interaction in VR, and the game inside is more likely a surprise but not a necessary experience for them. This may change if VR becomes more popular, but before that, how to balance the interest attracting of VR and of the game should be considered.