User Journey pt2 and Sound Design Basics
Although I did already create a User Journey, I chose to refine it more and come up with some cohesion as for theming which lead me to scrap some of the mini-games as they didn’t really fit and also it was difficult to come up with the designs for them. Particularly, the games I scraped were Game 2 (Conductor Control) and Game 7 (Location List) as I couldn’t see a method to introduce them alongside themes that could work together and the method to which to implement VR in a unique way, at least, the game being different from each other.
So with that in mind, the themes for each room really did morph themselves nicely after that, where I could make it so one room considers just the Top Level Transportation, Underground Transportation and finally the administration and business side of London Transportation.
Room 1 - Omnibuses and Trams
As you could probably tell, this room would only include 1 mini-game to complete and the rest would be GIA available to the player, mainly due the idea of the game being quite big in comparison to the rest of them, it seems like this would work out to include a lot of Big Artefacts as well.
Room 2 - The Inception of the Underground
Similar to Room 1, this Room would have not many artefacts so more Mini-games would invite more people to this Room considering it would give player more interaction through the use of play and receiving learning outcomes through that important interactivity.
Part 3 - The Little things
This Room would look at the people that run and support the Transportation systems in London showing records of how things used to be, whilst people will already have a reference point for modern day standards, using this method will allow players to understand how things used to be and shows the development and progress of the Transportation Network as a whole through design choices and advancements through people management. The representation of this Room is balanced where it should have both Big Artefacts and GIA’s giving the intended experience of the Virtual Museum.
Last but not least I started to look into the Sound Design as the intention is to give a multisensory experience, this is also an important element.
Sound Design Basics
To understand what would be necessary, Music is something that wouldn’t need to play a part at all, just Sound FX. Museums only really have music when they are showing a video, if I want to create a believable environment music or a score wouldn’t be necessary to sell the idea. It would be all up to the Ambience to make people believe they are travelling through time during this experience, so I came up with a list of things that were very important in that regard:
Footsteps would be great to provide audio feedback to the player that they are moving and the crowd sounds to add that ambience, plus when Players are in rooms maybe adding the sounds of steam to represent that it’s a working, breathing mechanism and maybe adding sound to indicate when the player has activated things would be good too. Again having audio feedback alongside the visual feedback can really keep the player immersed in the multi-sensory experience creating that sense of wonder.
Next Steps
From here, now I have some structure for where the game can go I can start working on the game design of the games in more detail, this may also already consider the control schemes, however considering we are in VR, I imagine the a lot of them would involve grabbing things, because that’s what we want, the player to be grabbing everything they can see and inspect the world through that simple interaction, but that might not always be the case.