Senior Project
Spring 2019
Orbital Loss
Orbital Loss is a VR game designed to explore intuitive and non-obtrusive tutorial design that can teach new players without frustrating experienced ones. The primary goal of this 12 week project is to create a prototype for a style of tutorials that are engaging, educating, and not overwhelming for virtual reality basics.
Planning
Week 1 - Brainstorming and Design Questions
Potential questions for my prototype to explore:
How do people explore environments that are completely foreign and how can we use that information to affect level design to make it more intuitive with built in, non obtrusive tutorial elements?
Or: How does playing in VR affect how players explore and interact with a new environment compared to the same environment in third person?
Have several attention grabbing areas to see if they go there first. Do they enter building quickly, especially one of the attention grabbing ones, or do they explore all of the exterior places?
Do people try interacting with things or do they try to get a handle on the space first?
How much variation is there in the way people approach the game at the very beginning?
Notes from Research
On Tutorials:
Play through the tutorial to make sure they player understood what you meant rather than telling them and hoping the read it and understood
Deliver information gradually (mechanics and UI)
Portal is almost all tutorial but it just feels like a game
Don’t talk to playtesters; watch and listen
From VR:
VR games that I find most effective seem to use a small area dense with things to do and see so I will redesign my level to be much smaller
Rather than modeled hands use a model of the controller so that players not yet familiar with the controls can actually see what they are doing in game
On the Genre:
Move resources like in slime rancher and manage resources like kingdom and slime rancher.
Survival like don’t starve; hunger and thirst go down differently depending on player’s actions.
Found story through environment and audio.
Week 2 & 3 - Image Board
During these weeks I focused on the big picture of my prototype. This included visual style, the opening to the game, and what sort or narrative I wanted. During this time I also wrote my project proposal and continued my research into tutorials.
I chose a sci-fi setting with the goal of encouraging people to explore. While discussing my project with the class one person mentioned that his girlfriend when played Pokemon she didn't even think to explore and I'm hoping that a less realistic setting will make players more curious and less likely to assume they already know what certain areas will hold.
Week 4 - Mind Mapping and Journey Mapping
Week 4 & 5 - Map Changes
From my research into VR games I've found that the ones that limit the level space are the most compelling. They encourage interacting with the things in your immediate area rather than wandering around aimlessly. Because of this I went through several iterations of my map, making it less complex each time.
Development
Week 5 & 6 - Level Creation
It was hard to get the scale of my level right in VR so I switched up my method for creating it and designed the level in VR using Tiltbrush so that I could quickly modify parts that weren't the right size. From there I tossed it in Sketchup to more cleanly block out the shapes of my building. From there I added more details and made minor tweaks to the layout.
Week 6, 7, & 8 - Modeling
In addition to minor blueprinting in Unreal I spent the brunt of these weeks creating the objects for my game. The main purpose of the game was to get people to explore and learn basic VR mechanics so the way the objects interact with each other and how the player interacts with them was very important.
Week 7, 8, & 9 - Prototyping and Testing
Taking what I made in the previous three weeks I started really honing in on what the final game would look like. This is also around when I started getting people to test it. I got both people who had and had not played VR before and I learned a lot about what people instinctively do when handed a Vive controller.
Week 10 & 11 - Programming and Final Visual Details
I set aside these weeks to work on finishing what I started, rather than implementing new features. Because this project is a prototype I prioritized making sure all the basics worked and that the game visually looked the way it was supposed to rather than adding more and more features.
Week 12 - Final Testing, Bug Fixes, and Minor Graphics
During the last week of the project I worked on polishing up the mechanics, movement, and graphics. This involved making sure everything was textured properly and that the player could properly interact with the world.
The video below is footage of testing of one of the near final versions of the game.