Simu. Play-through Beta Version

Reflection on Creating Simu

"How to convey the emotional experience of a character in the form of an abstract linear VR experience?"

Simu, an abstract linear interactive made to play on your computer and VR as well. Inside the player explores this world needing to pay attention as they explore and find the clues to piece together the story that lies within. In creating this interactive, we created an entire backstory and script for this interactive. We created a backstory because we were trying to emote the feeling of the character the player would be playing upon them, so to do so, we had to create a story to understand. Considering the time we had we focused on the primary scene of the story, which was an abstract part that we could have more fun in creating. We also felt that with this scene of the story we could create plenty of emotion to try and emit to the player. "The research used neuroscience technology to compare user response to the same content presented in three distinct mediums: VR, 360-degree video on a flat surface and 2D. VR received a 17% higher emotional reaction than flat 360-degree video, and a 27% higher reaction than 2D"(Adams, 2016).

In the aspect of our final product regarding what we submitted. We are happy with what we had completed. However, in our inspection of the game, we saw how some parts that needed more interactivity as well as more objects in the game to give a better understanding of the experience in the story. There were two scene that we decided to cut due to time constraints but effectively would not alter our overall theme of the interactive. There were some technical flaws as well as design flaws that we noticed upon our final product for our submission. However, we overlooked it for the time being that we only so much time left. We will be looking over and reviewing this in detail with one another to fix up any flaws for a more polished product for the showcase.

Through this process, we have learned more about the creative workflow in creating "Simu." We have also experienced where we had specific job roles regarding artistic and technical job roles. Dividing ourselves into these roles allowed us to be able to see how it would be in the real world where we would not do entire project ourselves, but part of a team. In part, we feel this has made us stronger in these roles and has allowed us to see possible weaknesses we may have that we want to improve on.

The aim of "Simu", was that throughout this experience using visuals, technicalities, and sounds to emit and have the player feel what our character was feeling. In telling this abstract story using different locations and their visual hues, we wanted to give the player a different part of the story as to allow them to piece together what is going on. We also created objects for the player to find and inspect to find out even more about the what is going on in this experience and the purpose of it. Regarding our original idea, we presented there were slight changes here and there to meet some design and technical aspects that we stumbled upon the process of creating this game. However, overall none of this affected the outcome for what we had initially intended for the player to experience.

As stated above some issues did arise after reviewing this interactive. However, we intend to fix those post problem for a more polished final product. We want to explore more of this story and make it better so that we can have people want to download and play this interactive. If possible, we would like to create a following based on it because of its abstractness we feel we could possible entice others to want to figure out more about what is going on this story.

For the creation of "Simu," for this project, we had to help each other in both areas regarding the project outline. We did maintain this setting but to a degree. However, we effectively separated our roles into artistic and technical positions to balance out each other's weaknesses. Theo was in charge of the technological development of the game overseeing assets and making sure they were properly ready for integration in the game. He as well looked over and did the majority of the coding in the game as well. Sal focused on the artistic side thinking of the theme of the game and its layout for how it should play out. He also designed assets creating notes for Theo to base certain aspects of the game.  He created the original story that as a group altered together to create an even better plot. Together we created this beta version of our interactive "Simu," which at the moment we are happy for others to download, play, and comment.

Adams, P. (2016). Report: VR delivers big on engagement, emotional response. [online] Marketing Dive. Available at: https://www.marketingdive.com/news/report-vr-delivers-big-on-engagement-emotional-response/430113/

Brewster, S. (2016). The Future of VR Storytelling. [online] TechCrunch. Available at: https://techcrunch.com/video/the-future-of-vr-storytelling/ Link to Video: http://tcrn.ch/1UkmjJR

Simu Test 8

    When we got to the eighth test, we began to hit a lot of performance caps for Unity. This is mainly because we were doing too much for unity to handle without optimizing the assets. So this led us to drop the first scene in favor of the loading screen, as scene changing for the first one to the forest one was causing the player to be stuck for to much time in between them. The menu ended up having a simple design to reflect the simple nature of the controls of the game. A Lot of the processing power due to the grass pack we bought that was the only grass that could be painted directly on a custom mesh. I took many iterations of the grass to get the game to run at an acceptable fps(frames per second). Eventually, the settings were optimized, and we placed the grass in adding a sound trigger to draw the player to the mountain. These triggers were voice acted and then sound mixed and modified to sound AI like. After which we placed them overlaying with the forest soundtrack and forest sounds. We then decided to add a walking trigger at the end of the path that the AI guides you through to ensure the player would trigger the explosion.

    In this scene were testing out the look of the menu we made. We found a font for it called "Fractal," which we bought so we could use it for our game. The sound for the menu is a bit of a precursor for the rest of the game regarding feel.  On the decision of cutting out the last scene, we placed a loading bar, which we intended on stylizing a bit more to go with the game. On the whiteboard, we put binary code in a way to have the player interact with the game hoping they would be curious enough to try and translate it. The sound of the forest was what we wanted to give off this idea of being lost unsure of where you are creating a bit of fear in during their wonderment of the forest. We also added a glitch effect to the camera that plays randomly trying to hint at something about the where the player is.

Simu Test 7

    The seventh test as a finalizing update to all the placeholder assets in the forest. We started by creating a new ground mesh and overlayed different textures in Blender so that we could bake them out to unity. We also baked out normal maps for the ground and created the final trees. Using an assets store product we bought we painted the trees onto the ground instead of placing one by one(as we had done before). The whiteboard was created outside of unity and was textured with substance painter to ensure and damaged/used look. We repeated this for the computer monitor, and they were both placed to draw attention to the tree that would scene change. Lastly, we updated the mountain by generating a heightmap from a scientific terrain heightmap generator which we used to create a high poly mountain mesh. After which we applied a mix of rock and snow textured overlay based on the normal position of vertices in the mesh. This allowed us to make any of the vertex normals facing directly up to be textured as snow and the rest as rock. For the trees of the mountain, we generated billboards by using the tree models from Speedtree. They were imported into Blender then rendered on an orthographic camera in neutral lighting and transparent background. Then we generated normal maps by using the vertex normals of the 3D mesh tree to display then render out into a 2D normal map for a billboard tree. Lastly, we made a particle system to generate trees on the mountain and rotate them to the player. This was all done to conserve memory for the game. 

    In this text, you see the set up of the forest is coming along quite well. The fog adds to the eeriness of the interactive. We added some objects to help create visuals for the players, that we would hope to improve the player piecing together a fragment of what is going on story wise. However, these objects were minor we plan on making more objects. We wanted the story told abstractly, but we concluded that the gameplay was not enough we need more.

Simu Test 6

    For the sixth test, we were more focused on the audio and textures of the kitchen. Starting out by applying prototype textures and materials to the kitchen, this was to get a sense of how they would look in unity. Then we placed an audio source on the radio to add music to it. We found a royalty-free song as a placeholder. We then adjusted the sounds on the audio source to create a sense of 3D space. Finally, for the forest, we were able to optimize the ground colliders not to make the player fall through too fast, but still had issues with them falling through after a certain period. The explosion was also over layered with nuke explosion that we found a tutorial on how to make. We combined it with the standard assets pack explosion and were still not happy with the look. So we added a fire texture to the mushroom part of the nuke.

    In this test video, you can see we created more assets for the kitchen and also added a bit of texture as well to give us an overall idea of they would look, making sure this is what this kitchen would look like. We wanted to the kitchen to have an emptiness to it with its simplicity that we would later combine with music to create an eerie feeling. The explosion you see as stated before was not what we imagined design wise. We looked for a while to din something, but the tutorial we used was the best we could find. Creating and having a mushroom cloud play out as we hoped in Unity, was hard to ascertain. The purpose of this part was to have the player feel a bit of panic as to the effects of the explosion would have on their environment around them.

Simu Test 5

    In test 5 we had the idea of making the explosion more present to the player by breaking the ground up. This by far was the hardest part of the forest as it meant choosing insufficient methods of achieving this which would later hinder other assets. We first brought the forest ground model over to blender and using a cell fracture feature we fractured the ground into 15 pieces. Then we brought it back to the unity file and added colliders and rigid body to it. The first problem was when we tried to disable the rigid body and only enable it when the explosion was triggered. The rigid body would work fine with the colliders when they were disabled, however as soon as they were enabled they would disconnect the colliders making the player fall through. This was due to unity not supporting mesh colliders (opposed to the traditional box, sphere, and capsule collider) working with rigid bodies. To try and fix this we bought a cheap add-on that would apply many box colliders to a custom mesh to approximate a mesh collider. This worked when the object was static, however, any movement would make all the small box colliders rotate individually causing holes in the collision to force the player through. At this point, we began looking into a more expensive collider called concave collider, but we decided to hold it off for now and try and figure out another way.

    In the door scene, we decided on having a simple door sitting in space keep the idea of mystery for the player. This door was not the ideal design, but again this was a placeholder for our future door we were designing. The skybox at this time was not for sure at this time as we were in between using an HDR or just a solid color of black.

Simu Test 4

    The next task for test 4 was to figure out a way to change to another scene in the forest. We wanted the player to use the tree as a bonus scene, and the main plot would be triggered when you look at the mountain. To make sure players would look at the mountain, we discussed possible ways of guiding the player. First, we had to alter the previous script minus the particle system to make sure that the mountain raycast worked adequately. We made a simple placeholder mountain and decided we would use an explosion to change the scene. To achieve this instead of running a scene change script when the raycast timer was done we instantiated a standard assets packs explosion (this was a placeholder). We had to test it to make sure that it would not interfere with the kitchen. As a last addition to the test, we added in the current prototype of the kitchen to adjust for scale.

    In this test, you see a small mountain as a placeholder for the larger one that would be created. The explosion was not what we intended. We were thinking of a more nuke like mushroom cloud explosion. However, there were problems in making this type of design. We would, later on, find a tutorial that helped to an extent but visually was not what we imagined. We also had some of the kitchen modeled enough to be placed in the scene at this time, but there were more assets to be made. 

Simu Test 3

    We then for the third test tried to add some visual element to the scene changes to the kitchen. This was to aid the player in keeping their sight focused on the tree. We agreed we would have to make a leaf particle system that would shoot leaves towards the player. We found a free script that would shoot particles towards the player Theo then modified it heavily and altered it to shoot leaves. The leaves started out as image planes however they were impossible to see so we used 3D meshes instead. The particle system would activate when you looked at it. We decided to code to delay the particle system to make sure the particle system did not just start immediately. At this point the scene changing mechanic was broken down into something like this: if player raycast hits tree start timer to start the particle system (if the player looks away in this time reset timer and trigger) then if player timer elapsed start particle system and new timer, finally if new timer is over beginning scene change script (if however the player looks away reset all timers and trigger).

Simu Test 2

   The second test we did was tough as we wanted to make a trigger system that when you look at one specific tree for a certain length of time, the scene would change. We found some raycast scripts that we applied to the FPS(First Person Controller) controller than on ray hit with a box collider that surrounded the tree we would run a scene change script. The problem was trying to figure out how to set a timer so that only if the player had looked at the tree for long enough, it would scene change. We solved this by starting a timer at each raycast hit. Then we placed a box collider everywhere around the tree's location that would reset the timer so that it would only run if the player looked at it. We threw in a room model from a past project as a placeholder for the kitchen.

   At this stage the layout of the forest was not done, so used a basic terrain setup up for testing purposes. The tree was a rough design created in Speedtree. This test was mainly done for technical purposes as for the kitchen was not done yet, so we used a temporary one as a placeholder.

Simu Test 1

    In the first testing of "Simu," we had the challenge of making sure we could make a scene with no skybox and black solid colour with a point light in the middle. Since a point light would not show up with chose a solid colour skybox instead. We had to remove the skybox adding a sphere with inverted normals and apply a diffuse shader with the colour black. Next, we had to place a box trigger to run a script that changes the scene. We made a quick environment in Blender and then imported it with particle generated grass from Blender. The problem was there was no way to optimize the grass for unity and no way to add wind. We also used Speedtree, a downloadable tree generator compatible with Unity,  to make some quick placeholder trees along with a dust storm from the standard assets back.    

    In terms, of design, this scene was meant to set a feel for the player of the game to set a tone as to what to come. We were also trying to convey mystery and curiosity as to what was going on. We wanted the player to think to themselves "where am I?" because in the script for this scene that was what the character was thinking to themselves. This was not the ideal design for this scene, because in the script it was played out differently, but for testing purposes, this placeholder was used until we figured out how to put the scene together.