Week 4
Narrative
The player has a device (their phone) that can detect the world of the supernatural. They discovered that there are ghosts on their college campus. The player encounters these ghosts using their device and help them accomplish their wishes. The player can befriend ghosts and collect photos with them in the photobook after fulfilling their wishes.
The ghosts were once people who lived and left their most important personal items in the area. After they passed away, due to their unfulfilled last wishes, their ghosts are attached to their items. They are unable to contact the physical world and long for someone who can see them and help them.
Due to the long time that the ghosts are bound to this ground, there are 3 types of ghosts:
- Conscious: Player can talk to; would assign tasks or give clues to player.
- Amnesiac: Need player to find clues related to their past and help them.
- Resentful: Need player to use specific items/actions to cleanse and restore consciousness in order to proceed.
Dialogue Example:
“Uh, hi. I’m Richardson, some call me Ricky. I I study English literature at Cranberry Mellow University, at least I once did. “
“Did you happen to see Miss Franklin? She is the kindest and most beautiful young lady. She wore her white lab coat all the time, like an angel walking on Earth. I adore her. I wrote a letter to her to confess my love, but I never heard back.”
Art
We finalized the character roster designs
We are working on turning them into 3d:
Map View
This week, our team worked on the mapping system. We used ArcGIS and mapped out an image of the Carnegie Mellon campus. We picked this cartoony-styled map because it matched the theme of our game, cute but scary. In Photoshop, we changed the hues of the image with a gradient map. This gave us complete control of the image, resulting in the below map. We decided to move forward with purple coloring because it matched the scary-cute theme that we are going for.
We uploaded the map to Unity and played with the skybox, shadows, and lighting to once again evoke the scary-cute feeling of our game. We chose green lighting to contrast with purple, as lots of horror games have high-contrast shadows.
The game really came to life when we added in the ghosts and buildings. Our goal is to improve our map in the future so that we have more of a variety of characters which players can interact with.
Floor is Lava
https://drive.google.com/file/d/169eCGFVKCGYqExON-KbidYZoTvKahsyu/view?usp=sharing
Incantation
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EYqblDz_2KrYCN6FPtoVWPcTQQYKQ6a1/view?usp=sharing
Ritual & VPS
One of the features we focused on working on this week was moving the phone in three-dimensional space, following a pattern to conduct a “ritual.” In the current prototype, the player’s current coordinates are shown along with the goal coordinates for each step in the path. Having the coordinates shown is temporary as the feature gets polished. Additionally, a line appears in the environment of the AR world. This line is currently simple programmer art, and will also be improved upon. The line shows the path that the player should follow. The number on the screen indicates the latest position the player has reached.
We also began working on understanding how VPS works. In the current demo, the player can place blocks within the space that remain in place throughout playthroughs.
Map
We are normalizing the map to the player based on the latitude and longitude.
UI
Start sketching wireframes for game guidance and player interaction according to the current flow and mechanisms we have.