Diya and I chose to do a 3D FPS style game for our project. Diya had the idea of navigating a forest at the very beginning. We began creating our game experience around that core idea. Our game, ‘valley’ – is an experience where the player can roam around a forest, interact with some of its elements, and explore the space. There is no objective in this game. It is meant to be a relaxing experience that hopefully takes you to a calm place.
We aimed to create an experience that closely borrowed elements from the real world. Real-ish trees, flowers, grassy textures and mushrooms are the various elements that we borrowed from an actual forest. The background sound is a recording of an actual forest that I found online. This, I felt would add to the experience of roaming a forest. The aspects of our game that break the assumptions of the real world are the mechanics of collecting mushrooms. Upon walking over the mushrooms, you hear a click sound and the mushroom vanishes. The disappearing, along with the fact that most other games use a similar mechanic to collect in game items gives the player a sense that they have collected a mushroom. Another aspect that breaks these assumptions are the size of some of the big mushrooms, they are almost as tall as the player. They also make a very comical sound when collected – this had no particular reason, I just wanted to see a smile on the player’s face.
We first tried to get the mechanics working. The player should move as expected. The player should collide with objects within the game – like the trees, for example. The next step was figuring out how to create the environment we wanted. We decided we wanted a path in the woods that would add some sense of direction. Diya began reworking a sample terrain she found but that was too much work. We then found Unity’s terrain maker. This allowed us to use a square and adjust heights, draw textures and paint trees. We later found out that this didn’t let us paint gameobjects with audio sources and scripts attached to them so I found a gameobject brush in the asset store which allowed us to do exactly that. Then we added flowers, mushrooms and other little details. We added colliders where necessary and scripts that would destroy mushrooms on collisions. We added a player respawn functionality. This was the version that we presented in class. We made changes to our game after our playtest in class and the feedback we received. We added little vignettes that the user could go to. It was meant to create a place to explore. The feedback we received was that for a large part, the space felt like it was on repeat. So added some elements that were different.
The choices that were made for movement and interaction were inline with gaming conventions. Over the years, we have gotten accustomed to a certain style of game mechanics. These seems pretty “natural” to us now. We borrowed mechanics from these “conventions” to make the experience easy and understandable.
The environment gives an exploratory narrative. 2 friends of mine who played the game told me that the sound and the feel of the game takes them back home where there were forest nearby and they’d into the forests just to walk around. Since the game draws so much from the real world, it is in some sense relatable. The lack of objective in the game also adds to this narrative. The ambience adds to the narrative. The game could be confusing to some, since there is no discernible goal. I find that it could also be interpreted as mysterious or exciting in this sense, since you have no idea what you might see next.
Files – https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1xIWQ7997REO8swUPN8KmjJ9a2NymHEfs?usp=sharing