Adrift Final Notes

Video:

Results of Playtests & Changes (Garret Wied):

A common theme from our play-test was that in order to teleport, players said their neck would hurt after a while. A way we combated this was by positioning teleport nodes to be at not such extreme angles from one another and by adding more. Also, the enemy would kill you immediately, but we fixed it to where it does not anymore by adding a health system. This was a unique challenge as we wanted the player to be aware of their health, but without have a stationary UI element constantly in the HUD. So to alert the player of their health, we have a heartbeat the player can hear, the more damage they take, the faster it gets. Finally, the enemy walks backwards slowly for  few seconds before teleporting away, only to come after you again.

Narrative Design & Sound (Kevin Benavides):

For our final stretch of our game, we felt that we needed a little more immersion for our short story. We had gotten the minimal viable product done, so we added in more collectibles and dialogue for the player to listen to. I wrote the dialogue and spread around some collectibles for the player to hear/read it. Additionally, just to add another degree of immersion, we recorded ourselves reading the dialogue and I applied some fun filters/effects in Audacity to make us sound like astronauts. Since we were focusing on polish as well, I went ahead and made some minor edits to some of the sounds already. It mostly involved tuning the volume controls of various objects and improving the spacial audio so the player can hear the alien monster coming sooner.

Applying Leveller Effect to Dialogue Recordings

Since we added a health system, I sourced a heartbeat and package tearing sound effect for our player and health packs respectively. Those SFX are implemented now as well.

As a minor touch, I updated our game's icon as well so it doesn't have the default Unity icon. 

Scripting (Laksha Parajuli):

The player now has health instead of being one-shotted. We rebalanced the enemy to be faster and by having to stare at it for longer before it goes away. Health is represented by a heartbeat, the faster the heartbeat the lower the health remaining. The enemy now also moves away from the player when being stared at. The audio logs in the scene now pop up text and play dialogue when interacted with.

Screenshots:

Adrift Mid-Point View

Video

Adrift MVP Build from Garret Wied on Vimeo.

The Environment (Garret Wied):

The name of our game is now "Adrift". I went in and set up most of the environment the player will be exposed to. The game takes place in a large space station with many long corridors. The player starts by needing to restore power to the station. After that, they must discover what happened here, and find the escape pod without being caught by the enemy. The teleport locations are supposed to represent air tanks the player grabs and uses to push themselves around the station. They glow blue to be seen easier and while gazed at, glow green.

Scripting (Laksha Parajuli):

I found a nice video on how to make an AI follow the player without using nav-mesh. I could not use a traditional nav-mesh AI due to the nature of our game not being bound to a "floor". This way the enemy is also always tracking the player and can easily sneak upon them. The player can defend themselves from the enemy by staring at it for 5 secs. This sounds pretty easy but the enemy does instantly kill the player on contact.

Narrative and Sound (Kevin Benavides):

I am responsible for the narrative and sound design for our game. So first, I developed the "story" that the player will experience. Basically think of a simple sci-fi horror scenario where the player is trapped on a ship with an alien life form and they must escape. In our game, the player must restore power to the ship they are stranded on so that they may use the escape pod on the ship to escape. They must do this while avoiding the alien that creeps through the ship. I set up collectibles around the game for the player to learn about their situation and to guide them towards completing the game. These are in-game story cards basically that are supposed to be old logs from the previous crew. I hope to make those logs be audio logs as well. Our group members would be providing the voice acting.

I found music for the game as well. I believe the music that is used fits our game really well and helps to capture the horror of the game. Music credit goes to Ronald Lynn Dickison. The music for our game can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDYwhsYTff4&t=1s

Our game also uses the spacial 3D sound in Unity to help the player to understand when the alien creature is approaching. The alien sound being used for our game can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T75WKbzifks

Another sound that is in the game to help the game feel just a bit more alive is to have spacial noise on the generator in the game. The noise being used for that is actually a idle truck noise. That sound effect can be found here: https://freesound.org/people/238310/sounds/370189/

First Executable

First, some changes (Garret Wied):

So as a team we decided to change the setting of our game to be on a space station instead of a submarine. To be frank, we did this mainly because there were very limited submarine assets for the type of style and aesthetic we wanted to adhere to, but there are a ton of low poly space station assets that work great together, so we made this decision to make our lives a bit easier.

We also have fleshed out the functionality of our game more. The player will have spots around the level they can teleport to for the movement, they do this by gazing at a designated teleportation object for a certain amount of time. As of now, we are thinking the enemy will patrol the area and attack the player if they get insight, but we are still working on that and it is subject to change as the player may not be able to run away quickly enough.

The Code (Laksha Parajuli):

I wrote some simple code to teleport around and created a light switch for testing. I want to make it where the lights flicker on and off so testing the light switch is a step towards that. The teleportation code is pretty similar to the code given in the video just with an added y-direction component. I plan on improving the code further by deactivating the current game object you teleport to so you are not inside it and reactivating it when you teleport away.

Bringing it all together (Kevin Benavides):

For a VR game, it's really important to have immersion. To accomplish that, we are going to have to focus in on the sound design of the game to ensure that we are accomplishing the horror theme that we are going for. Since our design has shifted away from a submarine and towards a space station, we will be looking toward ambient tech noises and how sound might travel inside of a spacecraft. As we move forward, I will be implementing the sounds that I create and adapt into our game, as well as helping Garret to design our level. Next steps for us are to get monsters into our game so that we can introduce the lose condition of our game.

Screenshots:

Recording:

Gameplay

Sunken first draft

Idea Overview

We wanted to make a horror VR game for the google cardboard. Even with the limited functionality, we are still trying to be creative and think outside of the "box". As of now, we are going with you are exploring an abandoned submarine, and your goal is to uncover what happened to the crew of this vessel. You take pictures to gain evidence and once you collect all the evidence, you win. There are monsters/enemies and the working mechanic as of now is that if you look at them, they move closer to you, and if they get too close, you die and lose.

Our Trello Board

Reference Art

From BioShock

General Google Searches