For my capstone project I wanted to create an immersive experience and experiment with Unity’s terrain building features. The emotional theme for this game is “serenity”. I settled on a simple step counting game where users could explore an environment and by “spending” accumulated steps, they can add features to the environment.
Features and Dependencies:
3D Models + Assets
- Landscape models– Complete
- Vegetation- I would like to create a beautiful scene with grass and trees and atmospheric effects, but I am not sure how much I can push the envelope an maintain a good frame rate.
- I was able to create a reasonable scene, but it did not fully live up to my hopes. Vegetation had to be limited to maintain frame rate.
- Water effects– Complete
- Pastoral village– Complete, though again, I limited the density of models to maintain frame rate.
- Skybox– Complete
- Thematic Music–Complete
- Environmental Sounds complete
- Animals– I had hoped to add a flock of sheep and sheep dog to the scene, but ran out of time. I did include a flock of birds.
- Day Night cycle with blended skybox.– I was able to create a day night cycle but ran out of time to create a blended skybox. Without that, the day night cycle didn’t look very good, so I have disabled it.
Game Loop
- Walk in place algorithm– Complete
- Calibration phase to set step sensitivity–Removed
- Purchase mechanic–Complete
- Flocking algorithm–Complete
- Navigation mesh–not necessary
Planned Achievements
Fundamentals:
- Scale achievement: Trees, rocks and buildings appropriately scaled (100)
- Animation achievement: Create animation for bird in bird flocks (100)
- Lighting achievement: Use a mix of baked and real-time lighting, sun is baked, torches are real time (100)
- Locomotion achievement: Develop walk in place mechanic (100)
- Physics achievement: Water effects utilize physics, the player is kept on the terrain using gravity. (maybe throwing stick for a dog?–removed) (100)
Completeness:
- Gamification achievement: Player purchases environment enhancements using steps (250)
- AI achievement: Birds will flock when scared out of tree. (250)
- 3D Modeling achievement: Create low poly bird model (250)
Challenges:
- User Testing achievement: (250)x2