Game Overview

In the Black Forest, players will enter a fantasy and meaningful journey using a VR device. The goal of this game is to find out the right path in the forest and solve the puzzle to save the forest from the dark and mystery fog to bring this world back to light. 

In scene 1, players will follow the candy route to locate the cabin within the forest. In order to locate the right way, players need to stick with the hint from candy, otherwise, they will lose forever in this forest. 

After entering the cabin, the players will enter scene 2. In this level, players will need to solve a series of puzzles to save the forest from the mysterious fog. On the first floor of the cabin, the major task for players is to locate the torch and grab the key to unlock the door on ar second floor. On the second floor,  players will need to light up the candle on the wall in certain order to break the cast and reveal the forest back to light. 

In scene 3, players will head back to the forest and tour around without worrying about getting lost in the dark forest anymore.

Development Process (theme, art, tech, and idea)

After taking the task of creating a VR game connected back to reality, we decided to go with one of the classic stories Grimm’s Fairy Tales. We quickly went through several stories and decided to go along with Hansel and Gretel. Instead of recreating the story in VR, we took the inspiration of environment setting and clues setting into our game world and rewrote the story to fit it more closely with the real world. 

For the beginning part of brainstorming, we settled down on the major skeleton of the story, The beginning of the game will happen in a dark forest. The players will follow the candy trail and enter a cabin in the forest. In the cabin, the players will need to solve puzzles to find the exit or break the cast of this world. By taking this rough story into the development phase, we started to head to our first prototype. For the first week, we figured out the VR controller within Unity and build up the development environment. In the scene, we started with forest terrain painting and design, and a candy model for the trail building. At this point, we achieved the most basic candy colliding and eating behavior and sound effects accompanied by candy UI for counting the number of candy that players picked up along the way. Unfortunately, the UI was not properly showing in VR as expected. Since we were majorly developing the game on the Mac system, it is impossible to test the game within the Unity editor. As a result, we were blindly developed for the whole time until we built the game and run in the VR headset. 

For the 2nd week, we build a separate scene for the housing puzzle and put some simple objects as placeholders for interaction coding. Meanwhile, we fixed the UI problem within the VR headset by binding the canvas as the child of the camera to make the canvas always follow the camera’s angle. During the 1-1 meeting, we demonstrated our full user flow and sketch for the housing puzzle-solving. Overall, we did a lot of  brainstorming during this week and focused on solving the minor issues before 

The 3rd week was our boosting week, we fully developed every single scene with a minor number of placeholders for some key items. We fully developed the puzzle game within the house scene and kept fixing the guidance system within the forest scene. In the end, we successfully achieve a relatively complete game experience for the upcoming in-person user testing week with classmates. 

For the last week, we took the suggestions from the in-person playtesting and move forward as much as we can. We added sound effects for the candle puzzle to boost the interaction-feedback loop. We linked all scenes together with narrative to open and close the gameplay. We also added more environmental sound for the housing scene to augment the scary feeling. We adjusted the skybox of the bright forest. Last but not least, we adjusted the lighting of the housing and make the overall feeling more darker and mysterious for exploration. Most importantly, we made huge progress on making grabbable items interact with other objects while the player is holding them. This change improves the overall in-game interaction experience of lighting candles and burning doors in the housing scene. Besides completing the game itself, we also devoted our time to recording footage and screenshot for trailer making. Overall, the project is completed successfully, but there are still several details waiting to be polished. 

Playtesting Notes:

The 1st playtesting of our game happened on 4/20/2022 in class. For this testing/showcase, we demonstrated a rough prototype that majorly focuses on environmental storytelling sharing: 

1. Observations:
   1. The candy trail is not obvious enough and players feel confused. 
   2. The ratio of environment and players are weird. Need to be fixed.
   3. UI is not showing up in VR
   4. The task list/goal is not clear and obvious enough
   5. The dark fog is really condensed and the light around the players are too intense, which breaks the overall mysterious feeling.

1. Feedbacks: 
   1. Consider adding some creatures in the forest?
   2. Scale the environment down and fix the candy trail to make it more sense
   3. Fix the UI from 2D to 3D to make it show in Unity
   4. Consider adding several a more tasks for the forest?
   5. The lighting of candy and players need to be fixed in order to not break the feeling of the overall environment
   6. Cabin’s story and environment need to be considered
   7. Candy needs some hint to guide the player’s movement

The 2nd playtesting of our game happened on 4/27/2022 during a group meeting in class. For this testing, we demonstrated the modified version of the forest candy trail, and a rough idea and environment building for the cabin puzzle solving. 

1. Observations:
   1. The particle system ratio is weird, and the size needs to be fixed
   2. The UI is working in VR, but the size, counting system, and position are weird. Need to be fixed
   3. The ratio of players and the environment is still weird. The environment still needs to decrease its size. 
   4. The torch interaction is weird and works in an unexpected way

1. Feedbacks:
   1. The particle system on candy needs to be fixed. The lifetime needs to decrease, and the color and the shape need to be reconsidered.
   2. The UI should rework to make it fit with players’ vision.  
   3. The cabin needs to resizing down, as well as the inner model of the cabin
   4. The torch and burning (disappear) action can be triggered by the throwing, so considered to modify that with code or object interactable way
   5. Overall sizing needs to make further adjustments

The 3rd playtesting of our game happened on 5/4/2022 during a group meeting in class. For this testing, we demonstrated relatively full gameplay of this game without the title and narrative portion from our plan.

1. Observations: 
   1. The ratio of player and environment is still weird
   2. The candy trail makes more sense, but players still can get lost.
   3. The players are not clear about certain actions without proper instruction from us
   4. The passing through effect really affect the overall experience
2. Feedback:
   1. Adding a lighting trail for the candy to navigate the player forward
   2. Modifying the deep damp in forest scene to provide a better gameplay experience
   3. Sound effects need to be added for the candle lighting process
   4. The grabbing, burning, and lighting action should make more sense compared to the current collider mode
   5. The bright forest is not distinct enough from the previous one, need to make it fancier 
   6. Change the skybox
   7. Fix the candy UI and make it land at the focus center
   8. Need to have a more complete story in order to bring the players into the world