Game Flow 3

From the meeting, even though Flow 2 was easier to understand and seemed to have a good reception in general I realised that I might have to make it more explanatory, so I devised on making the flowing to really structure it.

Revised Flow Diagram

To me, this seemed easier to understand, so what can be gathered from here is showing the various ideas of a Main Hub which the player uses as a means to access the other rooms and the need to personal progress is also apparent. Though considering how this works, theoretically, the amount of rooms that can be presented are an infinite amount, but for coming prototype, potentially making either one of all of these rooms would make sense.

To offer exploration, the player would have to find all of the artefacts present in each room and should be able to explore freely within each as well, but considering that this is a VR game, the main part to influence immersion would be the method of interaction, therefore all artefacts would have to interactable.

Artefact would have to be separated into categories to better understand what types of artefacts would be possible, the idea would be that in IRL museums these artefacts can range in sizes, to being something massive to something incredible small. Although the thought process would be to separate them as different categories, they should still be a part of the game’s progression. But the question is how would these be interacted with; here are a couple ideas:

• Big Artefacts can’t be interacted within Real-Life Museums so they would need a podium that could present information. This podium could provide the information itself within this game, but then wouldn’t have a interactable nature so using the idea shown with the National Gallery Online Gallery, the podium can still be present but the focus could be within the 3D environment where information would be near the Big Artefact on the side of it. The podium could be the activation device.

• General Artefacts would be small ones that the player can interact with and similar to big artefacts, the idea would be to present the information in the environment rather than a simple podium, now without a podium, the information can be shown next to the origin point of the artefact rather than on a listing infront of them and similar should be actiaved by the player and not being a static piece of information, so the player has to interact to find out more. We will call these General Interactable Artefacts or GIA for short.

• Game Artefacts would be something that player would have to interact with, similar to the GIA, the only difference being that a simple puzzle would have to be completed transporting the player to a brand new environment which is relative to the artefact that had just been interacted with. In order to return back to the Museum the player would have to play the game. They can either win or lose, but ultimately have the choice to explore more, or continue trying to beat the game if they didn’t do so successfully the first time.

Player Progression

Seen in the ‘Museum Hub’ section of the flow chart, there are little white squares which represents our player progression, which correlate to the artefacts in each room. In this case, G would be Game and A would mean Artefact, so if the player manages to complete the first game in Room 2, it would change to completed and the player can inspect that in that Hub. This adds an objective for the player to achieve not just in the Mini-games, but also within the Museum itself, but to this would require some type of visual representation.

Now the idea would be that the player should have information to what they completed at any time, but to add an additional incentive, there will be extra rooms in the Museum Hub world that have blank paintings or broken artefacts which will start to fix themselves depending on the percentage of the Rooms completed. For example, would be a large painting that will start by having a blank connected with Room 2 being a seperate room in the Hub World, as the player inspects artefacts and completes games in that Room, the blank painting will slowly fill out and have a whole picture relative to the theme of the Room.

Finally, considering replayability, mini-games in the museum should really offer an old school Hi-Score system which is only there for competition but incorporating that replayability the ratio, which extends to the learning potential for the game.

Future Considerations

This part would show some UI considerations in terms of positioning to the player with accompanying captions

Considering how the player will travel from room to room, if the London Transport Museum works, the player might have to use the train to travel from each room to each room. In this case the player should have a choice of where they can go. (in this example, the train could be relative to the time period)

The visual representation of the completion needs to be both a representation of the element but also could be a picture taken during development (for example, I could use a picture I took and implement it as a painting that get completed)

A method of progression could be shown as a piece of paper the player is holding and the prize could be paintings in the main hub

The crowd should be considered as the vessel that guides the player to the correct area without having the need to represent a line, to recreate the real museum experience people should be there and provide ambience to the room both visually and through audio.

Artefact objects should be fully fleshed out and the player can rotate the object with their desired movement, however considerations for audiobook descriptions could be considered