WEEK10 – DEVELOPING THE LAST 2 SCENES

Art

This week, we finalized our animation requirements for both the human and the child. A huge achievement is that we finally figured out how to import models into Mixamo and how to correctly integrate animation into our models.

Specifically, we modified the human model, which the creature transformed to, to faceless and added some animations including surprisingly looking around, staring at the player while the player is shrinking, crouching down to talk to the player and standing back up then turn around and walk away.

For the child model, we needed animations of happily walking into the forest and picking up the flower.

We customized the animations exported from Mixamo to make them fits better to our experience. We made changes from the human bending down to the player to crouching down to the ground because we think that will have more impact and make this gesture more obvious to the player.

As for the creature, we got a lot of valuable feedback from our halves presentation and we started to implement some of the feedback that we got for example more emotion feedback from the creature. We created a set of different eye shapes using Blend Shapes in Maya.

Programming

We imported the animation for human and children animation into the engine and finished the human walk away scene, and child walk in scene. Monster coming scene is under construction. We finished the monster controller and AI, as well as monster material and a teleporting effect to make the monster more powerful and fierce.  For color mapping, we are using post processing like gradient mapping and tone mapping to adjust the screen color to make the environment warmer before the transformation and scarier after the transformation.

For transformation scene, we split them into two parts: human growing up and player shrinking to increase the feeling of change.

Demo Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zucr9wl-Q0A

Playtest

This Week, we have tested with 9 playtesters. This week’s playtest focus most on the emotion of the our experience and test of the new transformation scene.

During the playtest, 5 of them realized that they become the little creature without being told the story. Only 1 of the players didn’t realize she is shrinking during the transformation, all the others feel the transformation strong, which is quite good. While 2 female players with some experience of VR complains that they feel a little dizzy in the scaling. 6 players felt intimidating while become the creature, 1 player felt angry and the other two player didn’t have a strong emotion towards it.  

Since we don’t have any player that have tried our previous demo. It’s hard to tell which transformation is better. However, the new transformation is still a strong moment for the player.

We explicitly asked about the players on what they felt when the hands are missing after the transformation. All of the players think it’s fine and accept the fact they can’t interact with anything after transformation. One player suggested that we can show the fading way of the hand to let player acknowledge the change. We think it’s a great idea and will add a task to implement that.

Asking about what player think their character is during the game, two players said they didn’t assume that they are a human, and want an attached body to clear acknowledge that information. But we think the problem will be better resolved if the player can see the reflection in the pond in the future.

Next

Next week, we will import all the animation of creature into the game and polish the scene according to the feedback. Meanwhile we will finish the remaining portion of the last scenes to make the experience complete.