For this week, our team delved a bit deeper into our brainstorms for potential games for the virtual reality game from the previous week to come up with more concrete ideas and direction of where our project could go. After creating a high level schematic of our various ideas, we were able to pinpoint strong core features shared among our thoughts, to collectively form a unified agreement among our team of what is important for development as well as consulting our client.
Our team came to the realization that the core elements of simulation and strategy were the types of games we were interested in as well as incorporating elements of exploration and role play. Further discussion occurred involving thinking about potential game mechanics and interactions. This led us to start thinking of prototyping! With all hands on deck, the Simtopia team jumped right into prototyping two experiences to test various interactions for what would essentially be fun for our guest and also what would make sense technically.
Team members, Mengqi and Iris, are shown in the preliminary stages of prototyping the experience on the Vive Pro.
By trying out these interactions and builds in Unity, team member Tianyi works to see if the prototype will be feasible before spending extra time on the details. This helps Simtopia with rapid iteration for play testing next week.
While the team tests out interactions in virtual reality, we also aimed to create small quick environment assets to test out the scale of various features.
Design and interactions are critical at this time, so we are making sure to track our progression through diagrams, schematics, and technical documentation so that it is easy to refer to later.
Stay tuned next week as the Simtopia team learns which experience turns out to be the strongest through playtesting!