Team collaborative
It was my first time collaborating with other majors. We kept the frequency of one meeting (online or offline) one week to sync our process. So we kept a very healthy status to advance the project. I think it is a very valuable experience for my future collaboration.
We used miro to share our thoughts, information, and progress. It allowed us to clearly see the progress of each part and whether it need an adjustment.
Design and Aims
We discussed several options at first, and confirm two directions of our project: focusing on gameplay interaction or focusing on narrative. We talked about some gameplay and stories that we were interested in and set the first goal of our project: read the storybook of The Miraculous Journey of Edward.
The story is about Edward, a proud rabbit, who gradually learns to love people. The whole group members love this story, so we decided to make the game mainly focused on storytelling. Limited by technology and capabilities, we can only use VR to do some very simple interactions like click, drag, and wave. So we settled our aim which is to show the story to the players with a few interactions that players can also take part in this story.
When designing the interaction, I mainly focus on how to make the interaction fit the story. A plot in the story describes how the rabbit was rescued by a boy and make it dance for her sick sister. The text clearly addresses that the rabbit’s hands were tied by threads and linked to the sticks which were controlled by the boy. I quickly thought about puppetry and found some references. I decided to make the room looks like a stage and players can use sticks to control Edward, just like a peppery.
The story also has one plot about Edward following a tramp for seven years. At night, they would sing by the campfire. I try to create a warm and calm feeling for players here. I referenced the interaction in Mr. Love: Queen’s Choice that a piece of music will be played when players touch a bubble. In my design, I cut a song into different pieces and use bubbles to trigger them, so when players touch all the bubbles, they will link to a complete song.
I sort out a clear storyline of the whole story and made a discussion with my group mates to decide which part we are going to put in the game. At first, we had too good expectations of our ability and try to make the whole story complete, so we not only select three plots of the story but also try to explain the causes and ends of each plot. Soon I found out it would be a really huge project after writing a 9 pages script. We only had six weeks at that time, so we have to scale down this project.
How to link three different plots and reduce the transition between them? It is obvious that I can’t follow the original order any more. So I changed linear narrative to non-linear narrative. What inspired me to this idea is What Remains of Edith Finch. Although the protagonist’s exploration is in a linear narrative, the key scene to linking all the stories together is the old house.
I design the sea scene to be the “menu” of each plot. Actually, the rabbit did fall into the sea once in the story. I make it a nightmare of the rabbit and when players touch the bubbles floating around them, they will enter the former experience of the rabbit. The player (the rabbit) will find himself waking up in the sea and exploring what he had experienced and finally finding out the loneliness in the sea is just his nightmare and he is being loved now.
The script of the story:
Process
We have a quite clear work division for this project. The animation students are responsible for the models and 3d animations, VR students are going to finish the coding of interaction and link different scenes together, and I should finish the script and those 2D characters and scenes.
We basically worked according to this process. It did have some problems when we developed the project like models’ binding, the changing of interaction due to technical limitations and limited time. Some changes were different from our initial expectations. For example, in the dancing scene, we hope the rabbit can have different movements when we press different buttons, but finally, we can only control the rabbit dance or not with one button. In the campfire scene, our initial plan is to play a whole song through touch floating notes, but it became an interaction that the notes will move towards the player and the player can touch them like Beat saber, though we found the latter one is more interesting than the initial design.
In order to make the narrative smoother, I designed a transformation for the dancing scene. I found many image references about the dilapidated wooden house, trying to tell players something through environmental storytelling.
In the background story, the father of Sarah and Bryce was an alcoholic man. He seldom went back home, but he also cry when Sarah died, so I guess he was not like that at first. Maybe they used to be a family with a mother, for some reason, the mother leave them and the father became an alcoholic man. I brought these thoughts into my environmental design.
I also designed some light effects in the scene. When Sarah was still alive, the fire of candles and fireplace was lit. However, when Sarah died, all the fires were out.
I also drew the scene of the campfire. No matter the dance scene or campfire scene, we both used a combination of 2D and 3D, which not only saved our time but also had a good visual effect.
Playtesting
We made a playtesting within our group when we integrated different scenes together. There are two problems reflected in this playtesting: 1. There was almost no guidance in the game, it is hard for those players who use VR the first time. 2. Some items for interactions used a very normal color, which was uneasy for players to distinguish whether they can be interacted with.
We made some text guidance for players and made the color of interactive items more vivid. At this time, we also add the captions and the music and sound effects from BA sounds students. But there were still big problems with the Friday game testing.
The first problem was that the bubble in the first scene was still very unclear. There were maybe ten players who played our game that day, but only three of them can find that special bubble and the other players need help from our groupmate to find out that bubble.
The second problem was the bubbles in the campfire scene had a very long distance to the players, so players had to stretch their arms to get the bubbles. The scene also lasted a very long time (about 2-3mins), every player felt a little bit tired in this scene. There was also no feedback of those bubbles, which was a very weak interaction.
The third question was that the caption in the scene was very easy to be ignored. The loading time of the caption was too long that sometimes players had already interacted with the game object but the caption haven’t shown up yet. Also sometimes the position of the caption was beyond the players’ field of vision and players can’t even notice them.
We solved these problems step by step. First, we made the bubble in the first scene very obvious. But also we tried to make the players can read the long test before they get into the second scene, so we made a step by step guidance of that obvious bubble. Each time players touch that bubble, the original one will disappear and appear another one. Repeating this action about seven times, players will finally get to the bubble that active scene transition.
Secondly, we shorten the time of the campfire scene and made it easier to touch the bubbles. Now players can sit on the chair to touch those bubbles. We also add a sound effect when player touch them successfully.
Thirdly, we shorten the time to load the caption and add all the dub of BA sound students. We also moved the caption to a more obvious position. Now with the dubbing, players should hard to ignore the existence of captions.
Critical Reflection
As a game designer and also as a collaborator, I think the biggest problem in a team is communication. This time I didn’t do the coding so I need to communicate my thoughts to my groupmate, but each time their work always had a little different and out of my expectation, There was also a period I thought the project was out of control. I think it would be better for a collaborative team to share their work at a fixed frequency and give suggestions as soon as possible.