Treasure Trackers
Group: Findlay, Lily, Julie
Description of Game:
In our underwater video game, we start off with a little bit of backstory of a sunken treasure. A father and daughter are on a diving trip in the Cayman Islands, having a conversation about sunken treasure, and the daughter decides to embark on a diving adventure to find the treasure. Now you are diving from the perspective of the daughter and must help her find the treasure! As you are diving, you must navigate her way through the sea’s dangers (stinging jellyfish) and receives hints along the way to continue your search (guiding the way to find the shipwreck) and clues once you find the parts to continue the journey. However, throughout this adventure, you have a time constraint because your oxygen tank is slowly diminishing. And getting stung by jellyfish stunts your oxygen level even further. Once you reach the treasure, you have one more task: bringing the treasure back up before your air runs out!
Here is the link to our design document:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1FXUg6eqSda2chHK7fgouPLvYJ922l-Ggpap7Xj0FLuw/edit?usp=sharing
Process:
From the start, we knew we wanted to focus mainly on the sound aspect of a game to create a more realistic environment to immerse the user in. And we stumbled upon the idea of an underwater themed game. We were inspired by Assassin’s Creed: Black Sail and Uncharted 4: a Thief’s End. We all acknowledged how different the environment sounds when you are underwater, and wanted to recreate that feeling and allow everyone to experience these feelings through a game.
We decided on a first person perspective of the game to allow the user to feel immersed into the scuba-diving experience. Firstly, we focused on creating and solidifying the storyboard of the game. As described above, by creating a solid story along with realistic and quality sounds/sound effects, we feel that the user would have the best experience playing our game, rather than trying to focus on visuals and other aspects, which we know will only fall short.
Once our story was solid, we began to prototype on Unreal.
Prototyping on Unreal:
Our first step in the Unreal Engine was to start building our underwater world. We began by building a ship, that would be used as the boat the player starts on, then we duplicated that model, and created a dilapidated, broken version for the shipwreck the treasure would be in.
Once we created the ship, we moved it up into the air, and created a large box with a floor to create our “underwater world”. From there, we used the landscaping tool to sculpt a sand-like ocean floor with mounds and cliff-like hills. We designed these to be obstacles that guided the user intuitively towards the next clue, and ultimately the treasure. We also used the erosion tool to create more realistic like coral reefs that would have been underwater for years.
After this, we added on a layer of sand texture to create the feel that the ground was the bottom of the sea. There was no sand texture on Unreal, so we had to find an external picture of sand and use that to replace the other set layer.
Further Goals:
We want the beginning of the game to be a cinematic cutscene of the father and daughter speaking on the boat that leads cleanly to the user’s first action: jumping into the water. We will lay a mesh the gives the appearance of the ocean’s surface, and once you jump in the water/ pass through the mesh, it will initiate a post processing to give the player the effect of swimming/ scuba diving.
We want the user to use WASD and the mouse/trackpad to give the user full 360 degree movement about the map and the ability to go to any depth.
We want to create the O2 tank meter and a subset that increases O2 usage if the player is stung by jellyfish.
We want there to be prompts given both with text and audio once you reach certain areas/ find certain clues that guide the user along towards the treasure.
Here are some of the logo ideas we have:
Difficulties:
Initially, we had a difficult time figuring out the logistics of our game and the feasibility of creating the ideas we were throwing out. We had a lot of really cool ideas such as a panic meter, but it would have been way too time consuming or too experienced for us to realistically play out. We had to use our rationality to consider all the features we wanted to include.
Halfway through our prototyping, the computer we used crashed and we were unable to open the file containing all our stuff! After trying four times with avail to open the project, Findlay went to see Brett. They tried re-downloading unreal engine, reformatting the hard drive, and tried to save the project locally, but afterwards he agreed the file was corrupted. Julie and Findlay are going in tomorrow morning to figure out how to store the project using Github. Lesson learned that using a hard drive to save the game file, rather just leaving it on one desktop, leads to difficulties. Also this go around Findlay hopes to model the boat, coral in ship wreck in Maya so that the assets are not lost again. We spent a lot of time modeling these assets, and quite sad to have lost them. We didn’t take screenshots, so the only remaining photo of this version is the thumbnail used in the Unreal project selection menu (inserted below). Also below is a picture of Findlay’s screen freezing red when we tried to open the file for the 7th time.
After our project was unable to open again, we restarted our project on Unreal again. I was able to recreate the box, sandbox, and map out our clues. I began the process by creating the game box and sandboxing the area the user would navigate through. I used the landscaping tool to create the mounds and layered the sandstone texture onto the bottom layer to give the world a more realistic feel to it. I also placed the clues and important landmarks.
So to restart the modeling process, taking Brett’s advice, I (Findlay) used Maya! It took me about an hour and a half to figure it all out, but the result was this simplistic diving boat.
It has about 9 scuba tanks and two life buoys. The boat itself started off as a box, but using maya, it became the boat. The scuba tank was my favorite thing to model out of the three, because it looks the most realistic. Next steps modeling-wise would be to model some coral and the two objects that act as clues in the game: a canon and driftwood.
Once we modeled the boat and put it into the Unreal, we created a player. The player requires 360 degree motion, so its actions include: forward, backward, left, right, up , and down. We are currently having some operational difficulties with getting the actions to actually take place, but the framework is all there.
We also began the framework for our O2 meter, sometimes called PSI, as you can see below. It only contains the visual elements, but our next steps are to create the timer and increased count down when encountering jellyfish. The ‘tank’ will begin with 3000 PSI, and slowly decrease. The player will be prompted with a recommendation to surface once the ‘tank’ reaches 400 PSI.
Here is what it looks like so far!:)
