R34 Airship Project - Week 8 - Creating a Story For Viewing In VR
This week I looked at starting a story sequence with the UI I created in the previous weeks, I decided I wanted to use the pointing UI, that allows the player to point at what they want to interact with as this would get rid of any accidental button presses while just looking around.
The first thing I needed to do is add onto my interaction system, right now it is able to detect what you want to interact with, but if it just activated something as soon as the interaction started, there would be unintended interactions. To stop this from happening, I added a timer to interactions, this means that the player has to hold their interaction for a second before anything is triggered. this will be displayed to the player with the button transitioning from white to red like a slider.
Doing this was simple, I added a semi-transparent slider to the button, that transitions from 0-1 as time passes, and once the value of the slider is over the max value of the slider, the action is triggered.
Once this was all set up all I had to do was create a scene for the story that I wanted to create, this would then be opened when the player interacted with a button in the scene. Once the scene was created I needed to have it play an animation when the scene opened. I've used unity animations before so this wasn't an issue, however, I had to make sure that the animation was as good as it could be for use in VR, this meant everything should be easily visible for the player in a VR headset.
The biggest difference between VR and normal games is how the player looks around, in a normal game the player uses a mouse or controller to look around, and they are able to see every angle with no difficulty, however, in VR, the player has to physically look in a direction, using their head, meaning for some people it may be hard to look at some things, for example, looking high up may be hard for people to do, so you I had to take this into account while making the animation.
Another thing I noticed when making the animation is that in VR, the player has full control of where they are looking, which isn't the case in non-VR games where the player would have their camera pointed at something specific. This means that the story should happen all around the player, otherwise the player could look the wrong way and not know what is happening.
These things can be positive and negative, on one hand, VR gives more freedom to the story, we're not limited to the small field of view the screen has to show everything, we can have experiences where the player has to look around because that's the best thing about VR. On the other hand, there are some constraints that come with making a VR game, having the ability to look around means more has to be happening for the player to be satisfied, otherwise the world will feel empty.
I've tried to use this knowledge in my application, the airship doesn't fly too high and keeps its distance, this stops the player from having to look up too much. the ship also fly around the player, this keeps the player from feeling like everything is happening in one place and makes the world feel less empty.
Starting The Scene
Doing this was simple, I added a semi-transparent slider to the button, that transitions from 0-1 as time passes, and once the value of the slider is over the max value of the slider, the action is triggered.
Creating The Scene
The biggest difference between VR and normal games is how the player looks around, in a normal game the player uses a mouse or controller to look around, and they are able to see every angle with no difficulty, however, in VR, the player has to physically look in a direction, using their head, meaning for some people it may be hard to look at some things, for example, looking high up may be hard for people to do, so you I had to take this into account while making the animation.
Another thing I noticed when making the animation is that in VR, the player has full control of where they are looking, which isn't the case in non-VR games where the player would have their camera pointed at something specific. This means that the story should happen all around the player, otherwise the player could look the wrong way and not know what is happening.
I've tried to use this knowledge in my application, the airship doesn't fly too high and keeps its distance, this stops the player from having to look up too much. the ship also fly around the player, this keeps the player from feeling like everything is happening in one place and makes the world feel less empty.
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