After talking to the course leaders we decided to focus on the Highgate cermetery and we started researching famous people that are buried there.
Here are our notes:
We decided to do more research and maybe focus on finding one thing that all chosen people have in common.
We have been having a LOT of issues making up a story. So we decided to pick a place and then create a story based on that.
Each of us did our research and came up with some ideas based on The Highgate Cemetery, King’s Cross, the Greenwich Tunnel, a modable room and much more.
Since we got and extension, I worked on this project during spring break.
Due to the timezone difference I was not able to join some of the meetings. However, I talked to my team mates and read their meeting notes.
During the break, I worked on several things:
We kept on brainstorming ideas and had two clear leads: one was experimenting with different points of view, you could take on the form of a cat or you could take the form of a bird and the same thing would look different from another perpective. The other one was focusing on one place and having many stories and narratives surrounding it.
We knew we wanted to have portals so we started researching the mechanic.
Meeting notes: https://www.notion.so/10-3-Meeting-5c1a62c7702a44e29eeb81215a725d41?pvs=4
After a lot of research based on Ana’s suggestion to look into UI used industrially in VR, I decided to come up with my final design of the UI. It was very hard to thread the line between a game and a serious VR software. But, with the right combination of icons and right ammount of text I believe I have achieved a good middle-ground.
I also decided to make the UI expandable, so as to not overwhelm the user the whole time while providing several pieces of information.
I also started working on creating fog but have been unsuccessful.
I had to do some research into making flickering lights. I ended up animating the intensity of the light manually in unity with keyframes in a long loop.
The what took the most time this week was sorting through all the purchased assets and selecting carefully which ones we could use for the project. I placed them around all the rooms to achieve a good mixture of rubble and abandoned furniture and objects.
Meeting notes: https://www.notion.so/3-3-Meeting-3382d134df2a47ec8364a36c8b999863?pvs=4
We started talking about the interaction that happens when the user goes into the pod.
The sequence is the following: user enters the pod, pod starts rising, bricks starts falling down, noise alters a deer in the background that runs away.
I made a second iteration of the UI design. This one was too gamified and provided little information, which is why I am planning on working on a new version.
I started working on a mirror in Unity that can reflect the user and the whole ambience. I made a texture to make it look old and faded.
This is how it looks in unity:
I will be condensing all of these months of work into different entries instead of going week by week. I will be tracking my progress and will create entries as soon as some progress has been done.
When we were briefed this project we were very busy with the collaborative unit project in which we got a special extension. Which is why this project had kind of a late start.
We started brainstorming ideas on how we could tell a non linear story in a cross platform way. We started talking about portals and dreams but did not have a clear story to tell.
Meeting notes: https://www.notion.so/24-2-Meeting-a6885d181060474a967d610ee10b42de?pvs=4
I worked on the UI and received some very useful feedback from Luke. This was my design:
The feedback from Luke was:
We also looked for visual references that could be allocated to each room.
We discovered several incompatibilities with the 3D models and the animations so there has been a lot of back and forth trying to find a solution that works in unity 🙂
Meeting notes: https://www.notion.so/20-2-Meeting-c1fe6dfd7f30417ca234d64f14d19e1f?pvs=4
We started looking for assets to use in the project. Both paid and free from the assets store. We discussed the floorplan, made some adjustments.
We talked about the types of interactions that we wanted. I suggested having interactive objects that could provide further insight to the story and have animations triggered by locations that could show the main storyline.
We developed a list of possible interactive objects taking into account the material, to see if it could withstand the time and weather degradation.
We also started discussing the possibility of working on the overlay UI. I decided to take care of it since I have a lot of previous experience designing user interfaces.
An and Ria started working on the particle effect of the ghost, which made us look into unity’s plastic SCM, creating a new build.
We decided to go for act 3 which is the most impactful and would be a great opportunity to showcase animations and vfx, as well as interactions. I made this graph to have a clear idea of what we were choosing.
We started discussing inspiration for the Departure Lounge building. A team member suggested looking into brutalist architechture and we decided to look for inspiration.
I worked on a floorplan and 2D storyboard. We decided to make the building round, however, the distribution of the floorplan was very useful.
We had our mid crit and it went really well, we recieved some really useful feedback. Link to mid crit presentation: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1NAwULtzBMMjx6MqsZCK1nDh9C8K1oPf8qYgjHOVUXsk/edit?usp=sharing