Tasks:
- Meetings: 6h30m
- Polaroid Camera Prototype: 2h
- Oculus SDK/Avatar Prototype: 1h
- Co-op Summary/PPJ: 1h
Total Hours: 10h30m
Positives: One of the great things about using games to tell stories is that the player can experience the world through the game’s mechanics. We had two meetings this week, and in both of them we spent time making sure we could take advantage of that, also taking into account how to make the best of VR. I think our gameplay loops and mechanics we’ve thought of for investigating scenes are organized, tactile, and flow together in a way that will hopefully. feel natural.
I’ve also begun working with the Oculus SDK in unity to make a polaroid camera object, since in all cases of what we’ve talked about we want the player to be able to capture images of clues they find for their “murder wall”. So far I have a viewfinder on the back that displays what a camera at the front of the gameobject is seeing. The next steps I’d like to take involve saving out frames as photos, as well as getting it to recognize what objects it’s looking at.
Negatives: We realized that a lot of what we want to do is quite overscoped, and since we wanted our game to tackle a sensitive subject matter (male sexual assault), we also had to take a moment and think about if it was really something we could do justice – or wanted to risk handling quickly – in a short time frame.
Ultimately we decided that wouldn’t be fair to the subject matter, but we still want to make a detective game that deals with a serious subject through investigation and also keep the game loops we’d workshopped previously, so we’re pivoting into more escape room focused gameplay about the murder of an inventor, and using that to pose the question “is murder ever justified” as we reveal his story. Cutting things you really wanted to make for a project can be difficult, but I think this is something that we’ll benefit from in the long run.
Looking Ahead:
- Style Tests and Moodboards
- Preparation of Week 4 Deliverables
- More testing and prototyping in VR
- Fleshing out the gameplay and story of our new direction
Prediction Error Productions 