Oculus First Person Fishing Game

Role: Programmer, Game Designer.

Skills: C#, Unity.

Project Time: 2017.10 (two weeks)

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Description: 

This is a 2-week team project for bvw round4, story telling round. The game is a VR fishing game tells a story about a son fishing with his father. One day when he is fishing, the memory of the fisrt fishing experience with his father flashed through his mind...The goal of this round is to tell guest a story while he is playing. The story we made is a simple but touching one and combined well with all the mechanics which helped us get the highest grade. The game is also shown in 2017 bvw Festival which impressed a lot of guests.

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Interaction:

The basic game mechanic is fishing with Oculus Touch. Main actions are the throwing fishing rod, rolling the wheel, picking and handing the fish and taking the picture with camera.

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· Throwing fishing rod

 

At first, I used a strategy that create a trigger cube in front of the guest. Once he waved his hand and collided with the trigger cube, I put the fishing thread in the river. However, this method is not Naïve Guest friendly, because people tend to throw the fishing rod low which is hard for them to reach the trigger cube without being informed. So I changed the checking method: I made the trigger cube bigger and lower, and check the throwing behavior by checking the velocity of the oculus touch controller. If the speed on Y-axis or Z-axis is over the threshold while the controller stays in the trigger cube, I consider the throwing happened. In this way, guest will have a more fluently interaction with the fishing rod.

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· Taking the picture with camera

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The mechanic of the camera starts with picking up the digital camera from father’s hand, then, player should hold the digital camera (with a screen on it which helps the player to see how the photo will be like) towards father and click the trigger with index finger. Then, there will be a white flash, the scene will suddenly switch from morning to sunset (father is no longer here, it is 10 years later), the camera disappears and there is a photo instead. The photo is just the one which the player took.

I attached a ray on the camera to check whether the camera is shooting father. If the ray hit a certain space, the scene will switch, otherwise, it would just like taking a photo with flash light, nothing else happened. I have to check the right angle because I want the photo later in player’s hand is nothing but a photo of father. Also, in order to make it friendlier to naïve guest, we decided to add a protection: the first click in useless. This really helped a lot because a lot of guests will click when they are picking up the camera. Thanks to the protection, the story was not ruined by this kind of misoperation at all.

 

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Features:

The sound effect was so important in the game. The perfect timing for different emotions was the key to make guests emotionally involved. Including the big fish moment, the music will become strong and intense; after the scene switched, there would be a silent moment only with ambience sound and the background music will appear slowly in a sad tone. 

 

Different fish will be caught each time, there will be different lessens given by father, for example, guest should let the baby fish go to protect the environment, also, guest will fail one time, and father will cheer him up and encourage him. We made the big fish moment as the top of the interest curve. In this way, we can create a huge contrast after the scene switched: from extremely happy and satisfying to extremely sad. He was there telling you how proud you made him feel but suddenly everything changed. There are rusty boat, broken stool and old photo, you are all alone and he is no longer by your side.

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All the team members put their photo with father as the ending credit. It is also turned out to be a brilliant idea because it is really touching and made people think of their father.

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Festival Themeing:

Our place is at the alcove. It is a rather small area but is surround by huge windows. We can actually see the lake and bridge through the window. We made a small boat using card board and hung fishing net on the ceiling. We also made the effect of wave by using professional lighting. The festival starts from 6 P.M. and we used led lights to light up the whole environment. There is also a photo wall contained all the photos we collected from our classmates with their father.

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Playtest:

The Other Day was played by a lot of naïve guests during the festival, all of them can go through the whole process from the beginning to the end. They are all touched by the story and some of them cried. A lot of classmates who was impressed by our game asked their parents to play it during the festival.

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