Week 7 - Rapid ideation session 2 - part 1

Here we go again! The last ideation session was wrapped up a week ago and here we are, ready to start the next one. This time there wasn't any dixit card or news headline, instead we got a clear prompt:

The theme is to create a prototype that solves a problem in (your) daily life.

The constraint was that the prototype will need to be interactive. Before we got the theme I had decided I wanted to focus on character modeling this session. But a character model itself is not interactive, nor does it solve any problem (other than the creative itch I need to scratch). Considering character modeling takes a tremendous amount of time and I will not be able to do both extensive modeling AND creating an interactive game prototype, this idea of working on modeling quickly got shoved out the door.

So here we are, a new prompt and no clue yet what area of game development to tackle this session. Since there are so many areas I would like to improve on and so many things I have yet to learn in Unity I figured it does not matter that much what I work on. As long as I work in Unity, I'm certain I will gain valuable knowledge. So I decided to just see what game ideas I could come up with that "solve a problem in daily life", and just take it from there. Let's get going, shall we?

Ideation phase

To be completely honest, I had no idea where to start and at first I was a bit disappointed by the brief. To me games don't solve problems, other than the problem that I am bored and I want to be entertained. But that's not really much to go on. Of course there are educational games, teaching you math or new vocabulary and the likes, but those are really not in line with my personal interests in terms of development. I decided to simply start with a mindmap of "Daily life problems" and see what comes up. Perhaps that would trigger the flow of ideas.

Figure 1: Mindmap of problems in daily life

Making the mindmap helped a lot. It was easier to generate ideas once I started writing things down on paper. After noting a few points I took some time to see if I could take any as a starting point for a game concept. Those I encircled with green and I scribbled the thought next to it in green as well. This way it became clear that I could actually tackle some of the things I wrote down with a single game concept: an exploration game in a nature setting.

With the entire COVID-19 situation I am currently pretty much stuck at home. I can go to places but with the numbers in the Netherlands at the moment I'm still working from home most of the time and I don't visit too many people. That in itself I don't mind too much, but the problem is mostly that because of this I cannot really explore. There is not a lot of nature in the near vicinity of my appartment and I miss that quite a bit. So why not recreate nature in a game as a temporary compromise? Nothing can beat actual nature of course, but as long as I don't really have access to that, a game will do.

Once I had the general idea of an exploration game, I worked out a few different variations of it. With the initial concept it was quite easy to come up with different ways to implement it. I still might change my mind along the way but for now this is the idea I'm going with:

Nature Explorer

Goal: Explore the map and learn about the different animals present in the area.

Setting: A green landscape set within a small mountain area. With plenty of plants and bushes where animals can be hiding.

Player controls: Third person view with free look abilities to explore everything. Movement with the general WASD keys and the mouse to point where you want to go.

Since last time I actually did not have any time to include a real storyline in my prototype I haven't really thought one out for this one yet. I figured I could maybe do it along the way. Perhaps I will be proven wrong at a later stage this RI session, only one way to find out! At least the general idea is that I want to have animals in the level which you can interact with to learn more about them. That should be feasible to implement in time.

The scope

With a concept ready to get started on, the only thing left to do before digging into the prototype development is establishing the scope. This time, I have a small codebase I can call upon that I have created in the last RI session, so coding should go quicker. The general player controls and camera controls I should be able to reuse so that definitely saves time. So hopefully I can dig a bit deeper into Unity this time. I have decided on the following scope for this RI session:

• A single level with with a mountain/grassland type terrain in which the player can freely roam about.

• Interactable objects in the level for the player to interact with.

• A GUI overlay that displays your "knowledge"points or interaction points of some sort

• Sound needs to be incorporated in the final prototype

Looking back on how the last RI session went and how much time I will have for this one, I think this should be a doable scope as long as I work with public assets as opposed to making custom ones. I have never worked with the sound system in Unity before though, so perhaps that turns out to be a lot more work than I am estimating it as right now. We will find out soon enough. I would like to incorporate sound though this time, as I think sound is invaluable for creating an immersive user experience. Without it a game just always feels unfinished. Therefore I think it would be good to gain some experience in working with the sound system in Unity.

Prototyping - first steps

On to the fun bit!! Time to start creating something. I decided to tackle the terrain first as I can reuse the player controls and camera controls from the last session. So once there is a terrain, there will already be something small to play. I was also just excited on trying out the terrain tools in Unity so that also played a part.

Working with the terrain tools was surprisingly easy! There was loads of good content about it online, like this great tutorial from Uguruz (2020). Working with the brushes to interactively sculpt and paint the terrain also was very intuitive and definitely easier than in Blender. It also helped that since everything is already in Unity, you don't have issues with porting the model and everything from Blender to Unity, and everything is already game engine optimized. I think I will continue using the terrain tool from now on, as opposed to modelling the maps in Blender.

I managed to get a complete terrain done today so the first step for this prototype is done. I included a small screenshot below so you can have a peek. Maybe I will revisit it it later though to add different flowers to make it a bit more lively, but for now, it's good enough.

Figure 2: Screenshot of the initial terrain in Unity

In a next post I will dive into the other prototyping parts, but this is it for today. Hope you liked it!

List of References

Uguruz, 2020. How to Make Beautiful Terrain in Unity 2020 | Beginner Tutorial. [online] Youtube.com. Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddy12WHqt-M> [Accessed 16 July 2021].