Overview of Week6
- Decided on the new prototypes we are going to build.
(We want to test some functions & ideas we can use later by these prototypes - Ideation about emotional expression in the AR world and emotion system in our project.
- Decided on the art style, made some art assets for prototypes.
- Talked about what we are going to show on Halves.
- Build prototypes!!
Passing & throwing cubes work!
After worked on high-five, clapping, passing and throwing objects features for two weeks. These four features are done. We are still trying to refine them. At the same time, our designers dived into more crazy interactions. Basically, most of the interaction we found during our research is the single player’s interactions. For instance, playing table tennis, players can definitely play with another player, but the activity can also be done by one player. So we tried to design something which needs to be done actually by two players.
What can be done by two players together
So we kept brainstormed and also pulled out ideas from our composition box. We found out that, in real life, there is something that needs to be done by two people, for example, moving a couch, stretching fishing net and so on. All of these activities need two people to operate one object together at the same time. In this way, we can bring more communication. In order to test this idea, we got inspired by the party game that two players need to hold a wood board. Why not let our players hold a long and heavy board together. Each player needs to hold one side of the board and lift the board together.
The first reason for having this activity is to build an activity that can let players cooperate intuitively. And the second reason is to test the physical effect. We also have several more ideas on what players can do together such as sawing wood, holding a fishing net together and so on.
In an AR world, we want players to have the feeling that they are actually being in the same physical world. So the physical effect is essential for our game.
Focus on iteration but not big ideas
Last week, we came up with the fishing ideas and shared with Carl and Melanie. They agreed with our idea about the physical objects. And they also wanted us to try this direction. But they remided us to focus on what we had right now and build on what we had. They thought the survival game idea maybe out of our scope. We all agreed with them, and focus on building the next demo and iterating on the demo we had.
New thoughts about emotion expression
Also, in our research, we found in most of the VR games, all the avatars are wearing a poker face. We found it’s wired and we read some paper about the importance of facial expression in the social environment. It’s said that there are 6 facial expressions are the universal languages for all human beings. They researched people with different cultural backgrounds, speaking different languages. But for facial expression, they have the same reaction. So we decided to explore more on bringing facial expression into our game after we’ve done the have presentation.
Emotions are auto triggered by players’ activities
Emotions are auto triggered by players’ activities
Emotions selection interaction
Art style
Low-poly: optimized for performance, clean, minimal
We all agree to make our experience friendly and acceptable by most of people. So this art style fits our goal best!