Supervisor Meeting 3
During this meeting it was met with a lot of good feedback, most of the games designed did need to fully fleshed out inside the game engine, but generally worked, the preference for adding the correct amount of ambience as well as the exploration for the museum seemed all good and he was happy with me to move forward and he thought this was shaping up to be a framework for other museums that are considering any VR projects to follow.
“Player enter a VR Museum Experience and they have a Hub World where they can track their progression in separate rooms within the open space of the Hub. That’s a really nice touch.
Using the Transport theme to use a physical piece of transport to allow the player to roam around the museum is a nice and creative touch too and all of the other rooms have a theme and game artefacts allowing players to be transported to the real-life equivalent of that activity like the design is working out”
Defining the game artefacts is something I had started at this point, but really was up to what I could find at that point, but the idea would be once the puzzle is done using that specified artefact, the player is instantly transported to the game having some association with the artefact and presenting some historical accuracies. But there were some problems that were mentioned as well, specifically with the following games.
Game 1 - Race on the buses - Because VR can induce nausea very easily and make player sick, I did think that making the player move in this environment as well would be a problem, but I need to think of another method in which the game can work the same way, but keeping the player in a static position, This is something that he was concerned about too. Although another thing he pointed out is maybe it would have to do with the dressing of the NPC where the player could identify them by social class by the way they dress. Personally, I think if i was to make this a more extensive project with a lot more time, I think that would be possible, but colours are easy identifiers and in this case you could have hues around the NPCs as well as their fashion sense in Victorian London.
Game 5 - Class Connections - People aren’t here to learn, even if they learn subconsciously the problem that was pointed out is that is more mathematical then playful, so I had to put less emphasis on learning the currency and making sure the player can understand the basics of the game to which the learning outcomes would come naturally where people had to pay different prices so the solution I proposed wat to put a focus on the simple act of giving out the tickets instead. Players wouldn’t want to solve complicated mathematical equations as they would have to also learn new currency (well technically an old currency) they are unfamiliar with and also if they get it wrong would make them lose a life, almost seems like there is an insanely high barrier of entry to play this mini-game which really breaks the essence of what a mini-game is supposed to do, so it doesn’t really employ the ideas of gamification.
After the feedback received from my supervisor on the project, I took the liberty to take time to make the changes for those games.
Game 1 - Race of the Buses - Changes
Now in comparison to the previous attempt, I really looked into how I could make the game static and then came to a realisation from looking at other game, maybe I could make the persuasion for Customers NPCs to be a simple straight forward interaction, similarly I could do that with the Street Sweeper NPC where shooting could be the main mechanic. We won’t be actually shooting the people, because that would be violent (although that was my initial idea for this whole project) if this is game that would be put into a physical museum, I want to mitigate that, so it would just be a shooting mechanic, but we will be shooting question marks and exclamation marks which each have their own functions.
Questions Marks being to persuade customers and exclamation marks to stop the Street Sweepers, so it invites the gameplay elements which could be considered somewhat realistic as in shouting to people to stop and come here. So it ultimately makes sense instead of player walking and grabbing people, this seems to make more sense. In order to see all these NPCs, the player would be on top of the bus where the can have a good ‘vantage point’ of all the different types of NPC Social class so they know what points they need for a potential challenge mode, which is also possible.
The base game would only be necessary for players get a 22 passengers quicker than the rival company, where points can matter, giving the player the challenge to get the best score they can with that limit, but with the challenge mode, it would instead have a timer, where if the player would complete the 22 passenger capacity, it would add bonus points and more time added to the timer.
Game 5 - Class Connections - Changes
For this mini-game there were a few changes for sure, now the initial idea like I said required some mathematical knowledge, but again with the feedback I understood is that people are there to play which would provide learning outcomes, not force learning. So now it’s been made simpler for the player where the instructions are the same, but now rather than thinking with money, it will be colours of tickets and the social classes will play a big part in that for sure. Whilst the currency is now something calculated by the NPC they will always give the correct change, all the player has to do is give the correct amount of tickets and place the money in the cash register. There will be a reference point for the player to follow but that would have to be dictated by the Level Design.
In order for the player to get the tickets, they will have to grab it and place on the surface in front of them, check they are the correct tickets and the amount, then if the player needs to confirm them, all they would have to do is use the stamp to confirm, but once that selection is made, they are unable to go back so it has a little learning curve, but ultimately gives a better player experience and has the appeal of making the player learn that social classes of tickets were a thing, now it’s just Zones.
This mini-game also can offer a challenge mode with loads of different changes, such as:
Actually implementing lives
having a significantly longer queue to deal with
Streaks
And wrong coins in the register (again, it will only be one of each coin if that’s the case, not like they need to add them up)
Next Steps
At least this way the game have now been designed, however now considering only making one of those rooms possible, in terms of actual creation for the prototype, because at the end of the day I don’t think I’ll be able to make all 6 available, that would be asking too much, but at least the ideas are all cohesive and make sense in terms of a VR experience. Players will only have to move in the museum and they will be in a static position when doing mini-games to make it easier for users in general if they played this Museum/Game at home, or in an associated establishment.