WEEK6 – IN DEVELOPMENT

After summarizing the feedback from last week, this week we are developing more art assets and building the pick flower scene, aiming to test our indirect control in next week’s playtest.

Art

According to quarter feedbacks, we decided to add more elements into the environment for players to interact and also reference for the transformation. We’ve eventually decided on adding butterflies, ladybugs and more stones into the scene.

We have finished our models for the butterfly and stone. And we will be animating these environment element next week. Ladybugs is modeling in the process and at the meantime we are creating the texture for all these assets.

We have modeled some trees, but it turned out to be too many polygons when put into the scene, so we will work on how to optimize it later. As about the flower model, which is an important symbol in our game, after we integrated our
first version of flower, we found there are some problems with the texture and the wilting animation is not as realistic as we expected. We will also be remodeling and make a better version of our flower next week since we expect the blooming moment in our experience will be a critical one.

Also, we are animating the little creature, which will be used for the second scene where the player will need to pick up a flower on the ground. The animation started with creature’s reaction when the player first sees it, which is looking at the player and the flower back and forth.

Environment

For unreal project, we completed the fog environment setting and rebuild the scene with high-poly tree models. In the meantime, we tried to make a fake reflection in the pond so that players can see the reflection in the pond but cannot see the model which is reflected. We tried to achieve this effect by disable the render layer of the camera for particular models, and enable it for screen capture in reflection. However, camera layer in unreal cannot be modified. Then we tried to use custom depth for object to make a model underwater to be rendered in front of water, but the fake reflection could not be affected by the wave of the water, it would not have refraction effect. So we gave up this approach and are trying to put some other object with reflective material inside the forest.

For performance part, to improve the frame rate, we change the minimum LOD level of high poly tree model into 2 so that since it is not clearly rendered in the night scene. Also, we reduced the particle of the environment fog effect, so that only few translucent surface will be rendered into forward render path. In the meantime, we used the exponential height fog to enhance the fog effect and light shaft.

Fog Particle

Exponential Height Fog

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Gamplay

This week, we have re-created the scene to be 3 times bigger than before to increase the feeling for transformation. Also we start to work on picking flower function. Now the player will can see his own hand and use it to grab anything in the scene that can interact with. The next step, we are going to add flower transition when the player picks it.

While integrating the animation of creature, we find the imported animation speed is not normalized in Unreal Engine, we will look into it later. Also we have setup the SteamVR environment, now our project can also test on SteamVR. We can test motion controller with Vive controller as a placeholder of Oculus Touch.

Production

After sending out our video walkthrough in Quarters, we received some feedback from Pittsburgh Faculty. Most concerns they have lie in how to measure player’s emotion during our playtest, how to make sure we evoke the feeling we think we try to evoke. Also they give a lot useful feedback on how to setup metrics on measuring our project’s effectiveness like creating the heat map of player’s head movement to measure whether our indirect control works or not. Overall, they also like our story and looking forward to the next step, which gives us a lot confidence.

Next

Next week, we will continue working on the making more art assets and integrate them to our scene. We aim to finish the flower pick up scene and test with players to get feedback whether our assumption is right or not.

PROLOGUE

WEEK6 – IN DEVELOPMENT