Lisa Walkosz-Migliacio- Launch Pad "Not Another Zombie Apocalypse: VR Murder Mystery"

Week 2 Update

With locking down some design on gameplay, it was time to start building! (my favorite part). Since I hadn't played with 360 photos as of yet, I went to see how it was done. I used my Galaxy S6 and downloaded the Google Cardboard photo app, took a picture of my living room/kitchen area by slowing panning around while I rotated around the center of the room. I went to view the photo in a 360 circle and noticed quite a skew as the camera does not take a picture of both the top and the bottom. To fix this issue, I added extra space to the picture to allow it to stretch correctly. For a truer 360 photo, I'd have to invest in a 360 camera which I will make sure will be a item in my itinerary for August. Until then, I'm going to play around using some clip on lenses this week to see if I can grab more of the 360 image.


After getting the 360 image look correct, I imported it into Unity in a 3D sphere and placed a camera in the center. I added a few 3D items in the space so that when the player's eye views it, it can become selectable. Since this is much like a 3D hidden object game, we want players to find items in the 3D space, and have descriptions on how they relate to the story once found.

So, anyone having any tips on better 360 photos, please comment!

Week 3

So, I went to played some video games.. for research of
course! The two titles, Her Story, and Life is Strange actually fit very
well into both projects I happened to be working on, so I will give
some ideas that came out of my experience. Both games fit into the
audience I wish to capture, and have appeals of story told through
exploration, which I am aggressively pursuing.

Her Story: An
interesting, non-linear story, told through old CRT scan line filter,
4:3 video. Hey, that sounds interesting! It prompts me with an intro to
our murder mystery story.

You are watching a stage play about to
begin, the curtain opens, but only a TV sits there, static, noise. You
gather closer to the TV, watch the clips of actors proclaim how much
they despise our main character. Someone mumbles something about maybe a
zombie got him, or maybe he was turning into a zombie, either way...
Gunshot. So now, what actually happened? I guess you'll just have to
play to find out!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5YbKUt3dEk

This week,
I wanted to make sure I could get this running technically in Unity. I
would use a test video to be played in the TV object in the scene, have
the curtain raise and lower, build a title screen, and make sure I could
indeed run a video (in both my development-Windows, and Gear VR-Android environment). I was very happy with this test, and now that the
technical questions have been answered, I can get my actors together to
shoot the intro. Soon!

-Lisa

Week 4

We have a room! Not Another Zombie Apocalypse is at
it's core a campy murder mystery. This week I focused on getting the
room of where the murder happens set up. Our plot tells us that a bullet
rang though the theatre when the curtain was down, and when the curtain
went up, we find our rising star dead on stage. There are a bunch of
items on the stage to investigate and start attempting to piece together
what happened.

I put up the demo here and if you gave your osig file, you can now instll it on your Gear VR.



Download the naza.apk, and install the apk file with ADB install -r naza.apk at your command prompt.
You'll find a cute little tv icon, run it, and stick your phone into the Gear VR.

If
you haven't given me a osig file, you can still play it on Windows or
Mac. I would love some feedback, confusion, inspiration, or just general
positive vibes too. Understand the story portion is not in the demo as
of yet.

As for next week, I hope to take any comments or bugs
found and fix them, as well as start in on how to tell the story of why
you are rummaging around on stage looking for clues.

-Lisa

Hey Lisa, what did you work on today? :D

Week 4

We have a room! Not Another Zombie Apocalypse is at it's core a campy murder mystery. This week I focused on getting the room of where the murder happens set up. Our plot tells us that a bullet rang though the theatre when the curtain was down, and when the curtain went up, we find our rising star dead on stage. There are a bunch of items on the stage to investigate and start attempting to piece together what happened.

I put up the demo here and if you gave your osig file, you can now instll it on your Gear VR.

Download the naza.apk, and install the apk file with ADB install -r naza.apk at your command prompt.
You'll find a cute little tv icon, run it, and stick your phone into the Gear VR.

If you haven't given me a osig file, you can still play it on Windows or Mac. I would love some feedback, confusion, inspiration, or just general positive vibes too. Understand the story portion is not in the demo as of yet.

As for next week, I hope to take any comments or bugs found and fix them, as well as start in on how to tell the story of why you are rummaging around on stage looking for clues.

-Lisa

Week 4

We have a room! Not Another Zombie Apocalypse is at it's core a campy murder mystery. This week I focused on getting the room of where the murder happens set up. Our plot tells us that a bullet rang though the theatre when the curtain was down, and when the curtain went up, we find our rising star dead on stage. There are a bunch of items on the stage to investigate and start attempting to piece together what happened.

I put up the demo here and if you gave your osig file, you can now instll it on your Gear VR.



Download the naza.apk, and install the apk file with ADB install -r naza.apk at your command prompt.
You'll find a cute little tv icon, run it, and stick your phone into the Gear VR.

If you haven't given me a osig file, you can still play it on Windows or Mac. I would love some feedback, confusion, inspiration, or just general positive vibes too. Understand the story portion is not in the demo as of yet.

As for next week, I hope to take any comments or bugs found and fix them, as well as start in on how to tell the story of why you are rummaging around on stage looking for clues.

-Lisa

Sorry for all the duplicate posts!

Week 5

Data visualization, in a campy mystery? Non-linear narrative? Oh yes.

So, I had a lot of time to think about how the narrative unfolds the player and I was thinking how flashbacks and past conversations work in a narrative as you the player are not involved, but are viewing.  This gives rise to non-linear gameplay where you can visit the same places but have different stories and items uncovered there. The non-linear gameplay also allows me to reuse places (which is good for development time), but also hides things that weren't there before which the player should be able to pick out more easily, allowing the hidden object game to become: what is different than before here?
Multiple conversations about some of my favorite Japanese Roleplaying games such as Chrono Cross and Chrono Trigger gave me this idea. If you aren't familiar with those games, they are from the 90s, and have a time traveling or different world traveling method for players to jump from the same place but different time, or different reality.
To make any of this non-linear gameplay work in my head, and figure out the timetable, I ended up creating a node for each moment in the story, and then connecting them with spoke to denote a natural progression of the story. Some spokes go to the next moment in time, while other will jump to a whole other day. Thinking about where to drop the player in, I would drop them to the exact moment of the murder. The player then will go through in a non-linear progression of uncovering stories and evidence in both the past and the future of that moment!



Since I noticed how overwhelming the visualization can look, I've decided to start using some game design principals of progression. Each thing viewed will be able to unlock only a small amount of nodes to choose from, making the unraveling a bit more designed, but still each player will have choices on where to go next. Each gameplay could result in different stories unfolding enough for the five different endings we have in store for them!

So far, this has really excited me on adapting the script to this method, and I feel bite-size narratives as you progress in the game are a great way to get the player to keep trying to uncover the mystery.

-Lisa

Week 6

All of the clues are pointing to something sinister! Okay, that's my hook for this week. But we have a new way to find your clues. I ended up using the second button for test purposes to get this working, but I would like to get a swipe motion up to see clues, and down to remove them. So far in my testing, it hasn't work out so well, so hoping to fix that UI problem soon. When you discover an item, it gives you a 3D model representation and sends the find to your inventory of clues. Photos of things not found yet have a very faint look to them so you may see what you are missing. After talking to many many people about hidden object games, they gave me a huge list of requirements, but I settled on these for finding items:

The inventory will have pictures (very hard to see, but you can none-the-less) of items you need to find, these list is shown in a picture format, not words.
You can pic and re-pick items you already found, they don't become removed from available to check out in the room. (this may change, but it was divided when people played).
Text and visual changes to item are seen when you find one.
A Sound is heard when you pick an item.
Both explanation is seen when you find an item, and when you are going through the inventory.



We have people! These are right from the asset store with a little modification, so they would need to be updated later, but I wanted to get a look to see characters in the physical space. Because these character did not have mouth moving capabilities as of yet, I use the quick talking animation with squiggly lines. It definitely gets across who is talking which is what I want the user to understand. The player is going to stay statically in place, but gets to move around the circle of drama as it unfolds. I would love anyone to give tips on how to deal with turning around and hearing different volumes from behind you, that would be a super sweet effect! Currently, Unity's audio let's me do 3D audio but it's by distance, to which the distance is the same always when both you and character are static. This might have to deal me with writing an algorithm to fix. :smile:



I recently played the game, Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness, and noticed cutscenes were a 3rd person perspective that could have the player rotate around while a scene was going on. I have to say I did not actually like that, so keeping with 1st person perspective gives it at least a more personal feeling of people are talking around you.

Hopefully I can pull together my voice acting soon!