Category: Collaborative unit

This week consisted of last minute changes and fixes.

I tried again during this week to add the rigged body but failed terribly, which is why I am planning on trying again for a further iteration.

We dedicated this time to fixing the lighting, which was too dark for the creative’s liking and reducing the amount of water on the floor.

We also replaced all placeholders with the real animations which we recieved at the start of this week.

We made updates to textures and added a few more objects.

The project still has potential to grow in the future but I am very happy with the final result.

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:

• Writing reports & game design doc
• Working on lighting
• Working on laying out all abandoned objects and rubble (more than once due to sizing errors)
• Working on lighting and ambience design
• Adding air particles
• Trying (and failing) to add a VR body for the mirror reflection
• Creating opening scene and credits scene

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:

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:

• Too much text
• Add more icons
• Look for more references

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

In this meeting we were provided a larger moodboard to use as a reference, as well as a written storyline separated in acts.

We talked about reducing the scope and working on one of those three acts.

We were given this moodboard:

For the next steps we agreed on choosing a scene and moving on to storyboarding to get started

We had our first meeting / briefing with the creatives today.

We were provided a moodboard of the general vibe and we were told the story in detail.

We made introductions and agreed to meet the following week.

Right after the meeting we decided to make a Trello and a Miro board. I decided to design the Miro board in a way that would be useful to us, which is why I decided to organize it like this: