Out of all the other ideas that we had, the one that we were most interested and passionate about was the Upside Island idea. We had a group discussion with Adam and he suggested that we just work on polishing this idea. Abbie started working on the story arc of the game as our game was heavily based on the narrative instead of gameplay while I worked on prototyping some basic mechanics and Kerris worked on some concept art.
The story arc is inspired by Kurt Vonnegut's Shape of Stories. He talks about how stories like Cinderella follow a structure that starts from Ill fortune --> Good Fortune --> Something happens and it comes down to bad fortune again --> but the characters works towards great success in the end. Our story for the Upside Island idea follows a similar arc and we quite liked how dynamic it was. For more stuff revolving around the story, check out Abbie's blog.
After we worked on the story and figured out the structure of the game. I started working on some camera prototypes.
Third Prototype
For this prototype I wanted to work out how the camera would transition from the top of the island to the bottom of the island when you switch characters. The first iteration that I worked on was fairly simple. The script would allow me to simply switch from one camera that is set on the player on top of the island to the other camera that is set on the player under the island. The transition worked perfectly fine but looked rather too static.
I wanted some sort of linear interpolation that enables me to have a smooth and linear transition from one camera to the other. Instead of using two cameras set on the different characters, I used two empty game objects looking at the players just like a camera would and made those empty game objects the child of their significant player character.
The next step was to make the camera move to these two positions smoothly.
I did some research on how unity handles linear interpolation and came across two functions Lerp and Slerp.
Lerp: This is a linear interpolation so that the distant between each step is equal across the entire interpolation.
Slerp: Slerp is commonly used to interpolate between rotations represented by quaternions. Through Slerp, you can achieve a slow in and slow out effect
I started scripting this behavior so that the camera can smoothly move from one character position to the other. I decided to use lerp as I wanted the transition to be linear instead of a fade in/out effect.
I figured that I should not just lerp the camera position as the camera is also rotating -180 degrees as the bottom half of the island is played upside down so i decided to also use Mathf.LerpAngle for the rotation of the camera on x, y and z axis.
I could always adjust the transition speed through the inspector and make the transition faster or slower at will. The next thing i focused on making the two worlds seem different. The bottom half being underwater and the top half being land, I wanted some visual feedback to polish the prototype slightly. I went back a little and researched how I can make different Post Processing Profiles and Lerp them with the camera. I looked into some Unity Threads to see how people code the post processing effects and found out that I cannot lerp between two post processing profiles unless I know how to write a very advanced piece of code which I dont. So I moved on to the part the post processing profiles just snap between each other when the camera is switched.
When "1" key is pressed, the camera lerps to the top of the island and it also triggers the onIsland post processing profile. When "2" key is pressed, the camera lerps to the bottom of the island and the underwater post processing profile is triggered and set to active. This effect worked very well and made the overall prototype much more understandable by the players.
Feedback: I asked some people on the course to test and give feedback on how they felt about the transition and what they understood from it. They got the idea that it was switching from on top of the island to under the island but the transition speed felt a bit too much or too little at times. They gave me some ideas of having other things I could use to show transition like the transitions that Sponge Bob Square Pants has of the bubbles moving up the screen when they move onto different scenes of the episodes or a simple effect like the screen fading black for a second.
I took some notes from the feedback that I received from other people and decided to leave this prototype at this stage and come back to it in phase 4.
So i went on doing some fun things with the prototype for the sake of testing different things:
The first video is me testing out how the visuals would look like in pixel format. I did this by creating a render texture that renders the camera at low resolution and applied it to a quad and changed my camera position to that quad so it only renders the pixel version of the game.
The second video is just me messing around with the simple movement I made, its a silly video but its fun to watch a cube.
Redoing Prototype One
Abbie Worked on the first prototype for this idea but it was not easy to understand in terms of the visuals so she re-did it.
Redoing Prototype Two
We also finished the physical prototype by adding little window s and doors to them. It was much more understandable for people as you could see the corals growing out of the doors and windows on one side
Presentation
After finalizing all the little details, it was time to prepare for the presentation. The presentation had to be at most 12 minutes long so we decided to give 3-4 minutes to the first two ideas and then spend the rest of the time talking about the Upside Island idea. Abbie prepared the whole presentation while discussing things with us and gathering all the work that we have done throughout phase 3. She added lots of mood boards from the games that we were inspired from and the artists we found online that inspired the visual side of the game. It helped us and others to visualize our prototypes as well.
The presentation went well and we all got to talk about what we contributed in our ideas. Later on when it was time for peer review lots of people wanted us to try and make it into a cooperative experience. We noticed that this thing keeps coming up whenever people review our idea. A lot of people want us to make it into a cooperative experience but we really do not want the idea to become a multiplayer experience so we stuck to it. Its either that we are not expressing our idea well enough for it to be clear that the experience that we want to deliver is a single player narrative driven game or people aren't experienced with narrative based games. This peer review made us feel quite down as we thought that we were doing something wrong. I think it was okay to feel this way, we just had to stay strong and believe in our idea and use the critical feedback that we get.
It was the end of phase 3 and towards the end I did loose some passion towards the idea as I always kept coming back to the idea we had at the beginning of phase 3 about a travelling storyteller. I feel like this is such a big learning curve for all of us in terms of learning to let go of some things and learning to take a step back and learn from the mistakes we made. I am looking forward to what phase 4 will bring.