Simon Says with a twist, Puzzler VR!
VR Design course of Udacity VR Developer Nanodegree makes us build a Simon Says VR game called Puzzler. As the name suggests, main purpose of this course is to make us gain the hands-on experience for the design process of VR applications. Course topics covers a brief introduction to the VR design, ergonomic considerations for VR, UI/UX in VR, simulator sickness and best practices to prevent it, and spatial audio.
Before going through the details, let me share the final product first for those don’t know Simon Says, to make understanding the whole concept easier.
Before diving into coding, I have thought about a persona. Who will be the player of my game? I imagined a male kid around the age of 13. He was so energetic that his parents put a HMD on his face while they are trying to finish their newest Game of Thrones episode in peace, for God’s sake, just distract the kid for 10 minutes. I called this persona “The Problem Child”. I had to make the UI easy to use and as big as possible. There should be interesting sounds, flashing objects etc. I’m sure parents would love my game more than the children :)
For the UI elements, I have used an online sketching tool. I personally find it easier to draw on computer rather than pen and paper. You become lazy after working as a professional computer engineer for years :)
My initial thought was to have a small text explaining what a button does; but after trying them in-game, my friend who helped me with user testing mentioned that those small texts are blurry and hard to read. Instead of using a block of text, I have made the button change color when user is gazing over it. This feed-forward mechanism made sure that user understood that object can be interacted, and looked a lot better than a small block of text.
After briefly designing UI elements, I started designing the game world. Udacity supplied us with a starter project that includes a great looking mountain, gothic dungeon building with both exterior and interior models, and floating ball model to use as Simon Says flashing objects.
After building my dungeon with supplied assets; my user test results with 2 people showed that dungeon environment is kinda boring and dark. One friend mentioned:
I felt claustrophobic. Out of endless possibilities, why a dark and gloomy dungeon for your VR game?
The word “endless” ring a bell in my mind. Time to fly to the space! I bet a problem child will prefer being an astronaut on the space rather than being an adventurer in a dungeon.
With those in mind, I started searching for free assets that can help me with this quest. What I needed was some 3D models for either a space ship, or something like a mining colony. After searching around Unity Asset Store, I have found the perfect free asset for my needs, Deep Space Outpost Level by Unity. After tinkering around with the asset, I have completed the level design for Puzzler project.
Next up is the space itself. SpaceSkies Free by NightSoundGames has nearly the identical skybox texture with what was on my mind. After downloading, I LOVED the end result. It was a perfect skybox, and also free.
One last thing remained and it is the Simon Says ball model. I could either use small chunks of asteroids, or use a dragon ball from the popular anime called Dragon Ball Super. I could also have summoned the dragon Shenron with animation and cool light effects. But I missed the due date of the project, so dumped that idea for future :) I progressed with a material similar to dragonballs.
After completing the visual side of the project, I worked on using GVR Audio Spatializer to make audio and SFX look more realistic. Thanks to this plugin by Google, my project had really immersive audio. You can easily tell where the sound was coming from without even seeing anything. I did not focused on it too much on this project; but it definitely will become bread and butter technique for my future games.
To sum up, this project has taught me about design tricks of VR content. How to grab the attention of player and make them look where you want them to look. What to consider for making game play experience not tiring for the player. How to make it more immersive with spatial audio, and lastly, how to move the player around so that they don’t get Simulator Sickness.
Acar Okan AKALIN, “The Tech Guy”, is a professional computer engineer working in the field since 2013, and a computer guy since childhood. He can be considered a real full stack developer, a T Shaped individual. Has professional experiences in back-end (Java), front-end, database, test automation, DevOps and many more. He is now dedicated to become an expert on Virtual Reality and other “? Reality” fields. Feel free to add him to your connections over Linkedin, and you can always join the VR Professionals (pun intended) group on Linkedin to connect with other professionals with similar mindset.
