WEEK 11 – IN PROGRESS

Art wise, we were still working on the rest of our art assets and animations.
For the human shape, we fixed some problems with the human and child models. After that, we modified our previous animations – replacing them with the new models and tweaking the weight of each joints to make the animations more natural and smooth. We also added in some more animations for the child who will be coming towards the player and picking up a flower in the ending scene. We made the coming animation to look happy to show the innocence of the child, which we will test in the future weeks to see if that works well.

Based on the feedback we got, we discussed about the creature’s emotions throughout the experience. Most of the playtesters understood the story without being told. They felt they were doing a good thing before they  realized that they had been tricked, which worked fine for the story. Thus, we decided to take out the creature being aggressive part for now. Other than that, we made a “being patted” animation for the creature as a feedback when the player wants to play with the creature.

Programming

This week, we have created the child walk in level sequencer, finished monster behavior and integrated them into the story, now we have a rough version of the story and we are working toward polishing it.

We integrated our bgm and sound effects into the scene. We researched on how to make the 3D sound more real, especially when the human crouch down and say thank you, since it’s a powerful moment of the scene. We looked through the documentation of the unreal sound attenuation and adjust them according to the space factor to make it right.

For the flowers, now they will re-spawn after it’s picked up. With this feature, we can always ensure that flower will be there when the creature looks at it and players will not have the problem running out of flower.

We also fixed some minor bugs including the wrong hand grip state when the flower is dropped.

Playtesting

This week we have 4 playtesters, we focus on the walk through of the experience and player’s emotion towards the ending.

During the playtest, 3 of them understood what’s happening in our story. The other player, who has zero experience of VR, stuck at picking the flowers.

The feedback of the playtester are mostly positive. They felt the transformation, scary feeling of the story. When asking about the dilemma, most players don’t get it right away. That’s something we need to work on harder.

One piece of useful advice comes from designer of Sims 4, she suggested that we should fade out the hand during the transformation, thus the player will have clue that they won’t be having hands in the future.

Next

Next week, we are going to polish the hand dissolving animation, integrate creature animations, and making new materials for human and child. The Soft is in two weeks, and we are working towards our goal and move fast.