UI/UX

This week, my team and I made some significant progress in our game’s UI development, specifically on the conversation flow. We wanted to create a more immersive and engaging experience for our players, so we focused on beautifying the UI and making it more intuitive.

One of the major improvements we made was the creation of speech bubble components in Figma. We designed two states for the speech bubbles, unpressed and pressed, to provide visual feedback to the player that they have interacted with the element. Additionally, we animated the three dots in the bottom right corner to indicate when a character is speaking. Players can now easily follow the dialogue flow by hitting the speech bubble to progress the conversation.

We also worked on improving the “nearby characters” notifier. Whenever a known character is close by, they appear in the bottom right corner. Unknown characters are displayed greyed out in the same area, making it easy for players to differentiate between known and unknown characters. These changes make it simpler for players to navigate the game world and discover new quests.

Another update we made was to the bag/inventory UI. We created an animation for opening the bag and ensured that it was consistent with the rest of the UI.

Narrative

The narrative with encounters, interactions, and dialogues have been finished as far as Beta version is concerned.

The storyline of current consist of three different chapters with 8 distinct ghosts of all three status types, conscious, amnesiac, and resentful.

In the first chapter, the player encounters the first ghost, the postman, and go through a tutorial for the item bags and task sequence of delivering a letter to another ghost, Rose. Then, the player goes to Richardson to tell him about Rose’s response to his letter. This chapter familiarize the player with the world setting of the game, the item inventory, the notebook, interacting with conscious ghosts, and the task sequence process.

The second chapter focus on reuniting a family of three. The player encounters the ghost of a little boy who is looking for his parents. The player finds the mom and learns a song. The song could later be used to help the amnesiac ghost of the dad recover his memory. This chapter introduces the player to the incantation feature of the game as well as amnesiac ghosts.

The player meets the first resentful ghost in the third chapter, and their quest is to cleanse their resentful spirit and help them recover their consciousness. In order to do so, player learns to perform a “ritual” in which they draw the name of the ghost by moving their phone.

Through these three chapters, the play would experience all of the main functions of the game.

Programming

As for programming, we continued working on our original goals for Alpha and fixing quite a few bugs. The ghosts now spawn at a much more reasonable size and the dialogue system shows both the ghost’s and the player’s dialogue.

One addition is using buttons to choose whether to move into an AR scene when seeing a ghost on the map. Additionally, when the conversation with a ghost is complete, the quest is now given to the player.

Over the course of the weekend, the goal is to redesign the GameManager system to support multiple scenes for each ghost encounter, as well as using additive scenes to manage this. Additionally, finishing the tutorial quest and connecting ghosts to VPS are also goals for the weekend. During the week, we’ll add three more quests, each having special interactions and objects.

Sound

For sound, the original dialogue sound effect was removed and will be replaced with another sound effect later. Production also began on the music for the first encounter with a resentful ghost.