FMP - weeks 20 - 21 - Archers and character customization

These two weeks were very busy at work because I was overseeing preparations for a release. I therefore didn’t have too much time in week 20. Week 21 I spent mostly on research into customization sections and drafting a design for our dragon customization UI. I worked on the following things:

• Night loop UX icons

• Bug fixes

• Integrated archer into Rob’s logic

• Customization section UI design

Integrating archer model into Rob’s logic

Rob was done with the castle attack game logic, which meant that I could set up the archer to work properly. The process was rather straightforward as by now I have made so many animation controllers and animation influencing scripts that I think I can pretty much dream how to set it up! Oh what a lovely contrast to my experience with setting up animation controllers in the 710 module. I was so lost and didn’t understand why my animations never triggered at the right time.

Anyways, enough reminiscence on my side. Let’s dive into the animator controller set-up. It’s rather straightforward. The archer starts in an idle animation, and it can switch to a running state, a shooting state, and a death state. The death state can be triggered from any other state, and it’s set up so that it can’t be interrupted and that on finishing the animation it transitions to “exit”. This ensures that when we tell the animator controller that the archer is dead, it also immediately responds and it cannot accidentally snap back to a shooting state.

The shooting state is actually split up in three phases:

• Drawing the arrow

• Aiming

• Shooting + recoil

With the game logic we have we could have easily just had those three animations as one animation, as we do not tweak the aiming part. But these animations were taken from mixamo and this is how they were set up. To make sure we wouldn’t need to pass variables to the controller to tell it to transition through the three phases, I set up the states to directly follow the previous animation after one play through of that animation. This essentially achieves the effect of the three states acting as one state “shooting” which is controlled by a single parameter “IsShooting”.

Figure 1: Archer Animator Controller

With the animator controller set up this way, integrating it into Rob’s code was easy. Rob’s code essentially consisted of the exact same states split up into separate functions or coroutines. I just had to make sure the right parameters were passed to the animator controller at the right moments, and that some “WaitForSeconds” were passed appropriately to make the timings of the animations follow the game logic properly.

That’s all! As said, a very straightforward animator controller.

Customization section design

On to the big topic of this post, the customization section. Since we started our work in Unity I have already been laying the groundwork on which we can build the customization with the use of smart shaders and blend shapes. However, one big question still remained; How should the customization section look? I set out to get a visual design together that I could start implementing in Unity. Before I dove into it I did some research into customization. Let’s discuss.

The importance of customization in a game

We all know that the option to customize your character is great in any game and a game just isn’t the same without it. But what is it about customization that we actually like so much? I scanned through some academic literature to find an answer to that and to better understand when a customization option adds value and when it doesn’t.

I found that the main effect of customization in a game is that it allows a player to better identify with the character they are playing as (Klimmt et al. 2010; Dolgov et al. 2014; Birk et al. 2016; Turkay and Kinzer 2018), which subsequently increases their investment into the game (Birk et al. 2016). Not all customization is the same though, sometimes customization is functional and sometimes it’s aesthetic focused. Turkay et al. found that cosmetic customization led to a more prominent sense of self identification than functional customization (2018). This was good as I wasn’t planning on adding functional customization as it would not be feasible in our time frame. Our main goal with customization is to help with the player fantasy of “bonding with a dragon” as well as “being the dragon”. Cohen argues that identification assumes both emotional and cognitive connections between the player and her avatar (Cohen 2001), which is exactly what we need.

Interestingly Turkay et al. looked at how different user groups interacted with the customization features of their test game. They found that the female group spend more time on customization on average than the male group. At the same time they also found that regardless of gender, the time spent on customization had a direct correlation to the player enjoyment and investment. Since we’re designing for both we should thus make it possible for male players to click through the customization quickly, while providing enough options to play with for our female audience.

Turkay et al. also looked at which customization options where the most used by players. They found that consistently across groups the most important customizable features were hair style, hair colour, and eye colour. A dragon of course doesn’t have hair, but in a way the hair style can be seen as the equivalent of their horns. So for our project this means that I have to pay attention to the horns and to the eyes.

Examples of customization of other games

I looked through customization screens of other games and at how these games do that. In particular I looked at Diablo 4, Hogwarts Legacy, Monster Hunter World and World of Warcraft Dragonflight (‘Monster Hunter World’ 2018; ‘World of Warcraft: Dragonflight’ 2022; ‘Diablo 4’ 2023; 'Hogwarts Legacy' 2023). Diablo 4 is of course not released yet but they had published screenshots of their customization sections that are in development. I put some screenshots together in a Figma file as reference material while I started on the design for our game.

Figure 2: Figma screenshot of inspiration board.

I noted that different games have different takes on customization, although there appear to be some conventions to take into account:

• Typically the character is either viewed in a central position or towards the right.

• The menu’s are mostly on the left hand side, with the exception of World of Warcraft: Dragonflight.

• There is a back and forth between a menu where you can select what character part to customize, and a menu that actually contains the customization options

• The camera zooms in on the parts that you’re customizing, as you’re customizing them

With this in mind I made a first design mock-up (see figure below) where I had the menu on the left side. The topbar of the menu could be used to switch between body parts and below it one could see the values that could be customized. The dragon can be viewed on the right and the camera will pan to the right areas.

Figure 3: Customization UI mock-up v1

I sent the figma file that contained all the UI screens to Hanni Bowcutt (student of the UX course, same cohort) and Rob to have a look at. I wasn’t entirely happy with them but wasn’t sure how to improve.

That’s all for these two weeks! Now it’s waiting for feedback from Hanni and Rob and I’ll iterate on the design in the next two weeks.

List of references

BIRK, Max v., Cheralyn ATKINS, Jason T. BOWEY and Regan L. MANDRYK. 2016. ‘Fostering Intrinsic Motivation through Avatar Identification in Digital Games’. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings [online], 2982–95. Available at: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2858036.2858062 [accessed 10 Feb 2023].

COHEN, Jonathan. 2001. ‘Defining Identification: A Theoretical Look at the Identification of Audiences With Media Characters’. http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/S15327825MCS0403_01 4(3), [online], 245–64. Available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/S15327825MCS0403_01 [accessed 6 Mar 2023].

Diablo 4. 2023. Blizzard Entertainment.

DOLGOV, Igor et al. 2014. ‘Effects of Cooperative Gaming and Avatar Customization on Subsequent Spontaneous Helping Behavior’. Computers in Human Behavior 33, 49–55.

Hogwarts Legacy.2023. Avalanche Software.

KLIMMT, Christoph et al. 2010. ‘Identification With Video Game Characters as Automatic Shift of Self-Perceptions’. Media Psychology 13(4), [online], 323–38. Available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15213269.2010.524911 [accessed 10 Feb 2023].

Monster Hunter World. 2018. Capcom.

TURKAY, Selen and Charles K. KINZER. 2018. ‘The Effects of Avatar-Based Customization on Player Identification’. International Journal of Gaming and Computer-mediated Simulations 6(1), [online], 1–25. Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281582949 [accessed 10 Feb 2023].

World of Warcraft: Dragonflight. 2022. Blizzard Entertainment.

List of Figures

Figure 1: Anouk DUTRÉE. 2023. 'Archer Animator Controller'

Figure 2: Anouk DUTRÉE. 2023. 'Figma screenshot of inspiration board.'

Figure 3: Anouk DUTRÉE. 2023. 'Customization UI mock-up v1'