Overview
For our final week of development, the focus shifted from adding new features to polishing our existing features and visuals. In particular, we made notable visual changes to both the interior and exterior scenes, as well as adding scene transitions. We also worked to better our guidance, as it was shown to be a consistent issue throughout our prior playtests. To round it out, we added a main menu scene, as well as several quality of life changes in hopes of making the experience more enjoyable for users. Overall, most of the changes in the gold sprint were to refine the current experience, and get it in the best shape possible for our showcase demo.
Visuals
Several improvements and additions were made to the visuals in our VR experience, ranging from lighting and better alternative textures to visual effects for transitions. Although these changes are mostly aesthetic, the intention is for these changes to provide for an improved immersive experience.
The Earth
For our last few iterations, our focus had been primarily on improving the ISS interior scene, causing the experience for the exterior scene to have been somewhat neglected. The ISS saw an exterior overhaul in the last sprint, and for the gold we saw to make the Earth-related assets better as one of the main highlights of the exterior scene.
We found higher quality Earth ground and cloud textures to replace the previous one that featured both daytime and nighttime textures and followed a tutorial for creating a customized planet material. We also discovered Unreal Engine as a prebuilt atmospheric object and combined that with the material to create a significantly more convincing Earth. In addition to post processing to emulate effects such as lens flares, these changes made the Earth and the overall exterior scene look much better and better simulate the view real life astronauts get to experience. It would also allow for much better in-engine footage for use in our trailer.
The ISS
We did some more tweaking for the lighting in the ISS interior, as well as updated some of the models within the station (e.g. the toolbox and the food hydration station). We also added a transition sequence when moving between the exterior and interior ISS, adding a dark vignette effect to make scene changes feel less jarring.
Guidance
The to-do list feature from the previous sprint saw an upgrade, now updating upon the completion of each task on the list and providing the player with a sense of progress as they explore the ISS. To further provide guidance on activities, doors that prevent the player from progressing were added, which only open up on the completion of tasks and activities. This was added after observing confusion during playtests as players looked past tutorials and activities as they worked to get the hang of the movement. We also implemented a voiced narrative system, featuring triggers and voice lines that can play and queue, which will hopefully give players additional tools to guide them throughout the game as well as added immersion.
Quality of Life
We also looked to implement a few quality of life changes to address issues discovered during playtests and overall provide a better user experience for our game. For example, during playtest we saw that players sometimes struggled to interact with in-scene objects, which turned out to be an issue with VRPawn blocking raytracing. We looked to better such collision and interaction bugs this sprint, as these could negatively impact the immersiveness of the experience.
We also observed from playtest that players may struggle with finding objects, due to where such objects were either too small or difficult to locate in the ISS scene or at times having floated beyond the expected area for the item. To address this, we went about adding a feature to teleport objects back to their “origin” if they get too far away, as well as adding an outline to notable objects and features that may be hard for players to identify.
The water bottle activity originally required players to 'interact' with it, which was not immediately obvious and required verbal explanation from us during playtests. This was changed this sprint for the bottle to spawn water bubbles periodically while it is grabbed instead.
Lastly, we also added a title screen for players to start from. We felt that it would be less jarring than randomly starting aboard the ISS and having players feel confused on what to do having been suddenly placed in a new environment so quickly, as observed in some users during our playtest sessions. Along the same line of thinking, we also set the initial spawn of players to be near the scene-transition hatches, giving a logical and notable landmark for players to start next to, both when starting the experience and when transitioned between scenes.
Marketing
Alongside our final push for gold, we were also working on a trailer to advertise our game. For the direction of this trailer, we chose to use a voice over similar to the one players hear in game. Since the goal of our project is to maximize immersion, we felt a diegetic voice over would best fit our trailer. For footage, we mostly used gameplay from our alpha video. We also included some extra footage we recorded in the editor to show off our visuals outside the station.
Reflection
Overall, this last development cycle saw us working to iterate on our core features, while addressing shortcomings gathered from feedback and observations from our various playtests. This was reflected in the various quality of life and aesthetic changes with the goal of making our experience the most enjoyable it could possibly be for our gold deliverable.