Storyline of the game:
You are a detective, who got the information that a person has gone missing from a house. Your goal is to find clues of what happened to that person. Looking around the house, you figure out that the owner of the house is a biology teacher. After being in the house for a while you hear that humming sound from somewhere. It appears to be a microscope that the teacher left behind. When being interacted with, the microscope drags you into the microworld where you see the biology teacher who has been missing. You quickly figure out that to save the teacher you have to solve a puzzle. The puzzle is to reassemble a human cell which will serve as a bridge over the gap between you and the teacher. Luckily, while solving the puzzle, your assistant manages to find a way to pull both of you out of the micro world, but you have to be in close proximity with each other. Once you get out of the world, you can mark the mystery as solved and move on to your next tasks.
Week 1-2 (Getting started)
The main focus of first week is to get started. Over the summer Michael Shiloh helped me develop a solid storyline and the next step would be to get started. Michael Allison was really pushing me to start from anything, because it is the hardest step to everything, and having something done would get the whole project started. I have implemented the basic environment using probuilder in Unity and have figured out the basics of the XR Development kit which will hopefully help me develop the VR functions that I need.
Week 3-4 (Functionality)
One of my homeworks for Michael Shiloh was to develop a mind map of the whole project, which is attached below. As for Michael Allison, he asked me to create a pre-alpha version of the game. For the next task I had to do some functionality and puzzles, which I have completed based on priority. The main priority was the functionality which I have created using primitive shapes (boxes and spheres). Using those I have created my first puzzle of assembling the cell. It was hard to decide where to go with the puzzle, so I waited for the meeting to decide where to go from there. On top of all of that VR basic functions were implemented.
Week 5-6 (finishing up the Alpha version)
For these weeks my main focus was to finish a playable version of the game which included adding functionality to the starting scene so that it will transition the user into the micro world. At first I have made the shapes to be as primitive as possible, later on in the projects I plan to use probuilder to create shapes of desire (microscope, organoids etc.). Another thing that I have created is trdying up the main scene, adding some objects from the asset store to the scene, making it look better. After that is out of the way I was preparing for user testing over the fall break.
Week 7-8 (mid semester presentation
During these two weeks we had a midsemester capstone presentation where I have presented the alpha version of my capstone to all of the Interactive Media faculty. Also during that I have scheduled a voice recording session with one of my peers Elza to record the voice over for guidance, based on the feedback from the user testers. The user testing was amongst my peers as well. User testing has brought some confusion since I tried to stay out of the way and not give out any hints whatsoever. Testers were not able to understand what the goal was and where they had to look for hints. I had to direct them towards the microscope after which some of the testers were able to finish the game. That made me develop the sounds for the game as soon as possible, since that was the main issue of the game: no guidance.
Week 9-10 (refining the capstone based on user testing)
For the next two weeks my focus was to help the users understand what their goal in the game is. To do so I have finished recording most of the sound samples with Elza and I have created shapes of the objects (mircoscope, organoids, cell).
Week 11-12
During these two weeks I have finally added the sounds into the game as well as transitions between scenes. I have finished the full game where it has a beginning and and end to the story. Finalized another room as well as adding so trigger boxes in the environment which will trigger some of the audio like "do you also hear that sound?"
