Changing Perspective

This week we started developing for EVR's first mini game. This brings me to a quote that a wise person once said: 'pics or it didn't happen.'

Screenshot 'To Prove We Are Really Developing Things' Sunday:




While Rashi Abramson and I were developing together in collaboration mode as part of Unity's new Beta program (Version 5.5), these are some of the questions we ran into and solutions discussed:

How do you compensate for testing gameplay without a 3D character to start with?

• Here we used the roll a ball character for now and changed the camera rotation, height and angle to show a first person perspective when playing the game.

Speaking of camera angles, when you are moving in different directions, how are you able to look at your surroundings?

• For the roll a ball tutorial in Unity, there is a single main camera that looks out in one direction the entire time. An idea I had, was what if we had four cameras instead of one above the main character, each one facing a different cardinal direction and then switching to that camera view when a key input is made?

• The camera perspective seems to be one of the trickiest components of game play that I had not anticipated. For example, when the camera is far away from and facing the main character (as in a third person perspective) and you go too near the edge of the world, you get this weird view of what's outside the border (oblivion if there's nothing). Maybe some of you have experienced this in games before?

• Alternatively, if the camera is too close to the character, you may not have a clear shot of the periphery, this is tied to spatial uncertainty leading to confusion and frustration. For example, if you reach a wall and that is all you see, it will be difficult to think about which way to turn because you have less cues from your environment. 

At the moment, it is possible to see beyond the green ground that we are playing on, into the gray developer's oblivion. How do we change that?

• I haven't looked into this yet, though my initial hypothesis is that there must be some kind of spherical atmosphere you can overlay onto the plane. Some kind of image background that will help the environment tie together.

Are we going to see a VR game soon?

• Our plan is to start out as a 3D mini game for the PC and hope to transform it into a VR game once it's ready.

What's the difference between a 3D and Virtual Reality game?

• 3D games are played off of a screen, where you are the spectator. Whereas Virtual Reality involves wearing a sensory device such as a visual headset that has tracking sensors, which record your head movements and allows you to become a participant in the game. What you see when wearing these goggles is meant to mimic a human's field of view (114 degrees) through binocular vision. This imitation of the field of view tricks your brain into thinking you have been transported into an alternate reality. This can be very immersive and sometimes scary as it can feel a little too real at times. Leap Motion is another cool add on device placed on the front of a VR headset that allows you to use your hands to manipulate objects in the game, such as pulling levers or turning a wheel. One of the coolest things I enjoyed with the Leap Motion was actually throwing around game objects including characters and watching their emotional expressions change from calm to frightened as I picked them up. This all adds on an extra layer of mimicking reality through manipulating your surroundings.

Finishing Up Roll a Ball - Part 4

Hello and welcome, today we will wrap up Unity's first tutorial picking up from 'Displaying Score and Text'.

Here we add a counter to keep track of how many game objects are collected and also display the text of the score and a message whenever the game is over.

Adding a Counter:

To display text, we go to the heirarchy create menu and click on UI --> Create and voila:

AHHHH, that is too big.

Like other objects, we want to reset the transform to origin. For the UI element, instead of a regular transform box, we see the Rect Transform. This is different as it has to do with anchoring and positioning.

Zoomed in:

Now if we want to change the position of the text from the center middle of the screen, we can click on the Anchor button and now get to select from a number of options. Here we select top + left after holding down Shift + Alt.

Original Anchoring

Changed To Show Text at Top Left Corner of Game Screen:

The last step was to add a Win Text message for when all the game objects are collected.

Adding a Win Text:

Here we just repeated the steps from above, except positioned it a little offset in the positive y direction from the player object.

Building / Deploying the Game:

Then you can build your game for an OS by clicking on the executable file.

I was surprised with how easy it was to deploy for different operating systems. The default option was PC, Mac, and Linux Standalone.

They have options for mobile as well.

Here is the final game:

Completing this first tutorial was a lot of fun and has given me a lot of ideas on what I can include for my own game. Look out for the next tutorial review!