PROJECT 4 — VR DESIGN — PUZZLER

The goal of this project was to create a game where the user enters a dungeon, solves a puzzle by repeating a certain sequence of lighting up orbs, and then exiting the dungeon after completing the puzzle.
I did this project because it’s a part of the training program of UDACITY which has the goal of designing a game from scratch, taking into consideration different topics of how to design a game properly, starting with scale, working through ergonomics, learning to create a user interface, to using sound and lighting to create a certain atmosphere.
It’s a very simple game which can be understood and played by VR newcomers as a VR intro to awaken some interest in virtual reality and then maybe dig deeper into the subject and enjoy games with much higher quality and immersion.
The build itself just took me a few hours to complete but dealing with the broken or wrong scripts got me really working hard for many hours and days til I got it finally right.

PERSONA

Kiddo,10 years old, goes to school, has very little or no experience with VR and just wants to have fun, play around, and then go with his friends to the cinema after eating ice cream :-)

QUOTE: I don’t like school, I just wanna play with my friends and become a movie star when I grow up and marry Madonna :-)

PROCESS SECTION

Sketch:

Screenshot of 1st build:

USER TEST

Anna liked the game very much, scaling was good, gameplay was good, but she didn’t like the color of the dungeon, too blue for her, the place was too big, didn’t like the candle lights…
So I built everything again from scratch, made it smaller, changed color, positioned things differently, showed her, she liked it, so here is the final result:

FINAL RESULT

For a reason I don’t know, the Unity editor won’t play the game, so I recorded it on my phone:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLlnvFUx-hA&feature=youtu.be1

It took several steps to reach this result, starting with the basic build of the dungeon and the orbs, continuing with lighting and sound, adding a user interface at the start and end of this game, and finally bind it all together with game mechanics using different scripts to make it all work as it should, starting with the UI at the beginning of the game, then moving inside the dungeon, making the actual puzzle work as it should, and finally moving out of the dungeon after completing the puzzle.

CHALLENGES AND DIFFICULTIES

The build was pretty easy to do since I took already term 1 where I learned how to build the apartment and deploy it to my android phone, so this part was pretty easy, even when I had to rebuild the whole thing it didn’t take me more than an hour.
The problem here was the coding:slight_smile:

There were many mistakes in the scripts but as a mentor told me this was on purpose so we could work through it and challenge ourselves…
The whole process was very, VERY difficult because I m new to coding, and in term one there wasn’t really a deep dive into scripting, just a few things on the surface, so naturally this part was really, really, REALLY hard!But once I figured it out, some on my own, some with the help of a mentor in the forums, in the end I feel it was better this way because through playing around with the scripts I got a deeper understanding of it, still a lot to learn, but now I feel a bit better about it, more confident that one day in the near future I will be able to handle it with ease.

WHAT’S NEXT

There is still one project left, the ‘night in the museum’, and then I can finally move on to term 3 where I will learn to work with and build for the Oculus Rift in Unity and/or Unreal Engine, and finally learn how to create the game I have in my mind for a few months now and which was the only reason I took this whole course so I can build it myself from start to finish.Term 1 was pretty good because it taught me how to set up the environment I want, term 2 and this fighting with the code was a good learning experience too, and also the UI lessons because this is something I was wondering about how to do it since I will need it in the game I wanna create.

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