Wonderland - Prototyping

Since my idea was only accepted by the lecturers in week 6, I only had one week to prepare for the first formative assessment. This time around I'm going to focus on the core mechanics of the project (shrink & grow).

Core Mechanism 0.1 (First Formative Assessment)

I took the concept test on July 5th, and there were 7 people who participated in my concept test.

After a concept test, I found that all testers said the core experience was fun to set up but very complicated to operate. 42% of the testers were unable to complete the test because of the way they did not understand the operation and some said they had motion sickness. At the same time, 29% of the testers felt that continuous movement was better than teleportation.

After feedback from testers, I decided to change the mechanism of the original core experience, because it was too complicated.

Here is the initial core experience interaction (Shrink and Grow) operation:

Initially, my idea is users need to press X/A to Shrink/Grow character, and if they want to Shrink/Grow an object, they have to press Y/B to activate Shrink/Grow object and press Select to hold an object, and lastly press Activate to do the Shrink/Grow behavior.

Those testers feel that the operation is hard to remember, especially when they want to shrink/grow an object. Besides, the Shrink/Grow character buttons and Activate Shrink/Grow object buttons are too near, most of the time they will press by mistake.

Core Mechanism 0.2

After the first formative assessment, I made changes to the core mechanics based on the test results. The core mechanism now is that players only need to pick up the corresponding bottle and drink it or drop it on the object that wants to become larger or smaller to make it bigger or smaller.

After consultation with the lecturer, the lecturer said that this method would indeed be more intuitive. So I will decide to use this method.

Prototype 1.0

This prototype completes the flow from the Woods to the Hall. But the woods don't look very much like the Woods now. It will be improved in the next version.

Prototype 1.1

This prototype improves the wood scene design. And the process in the Hall will show corresponding items according to the content of the dialogue.

I also tested another skybox in the Hall scene.

Change Concept

In the 2 rd formative assessment, I originally intended to have guests test the flow of my story, and I wanted the guest to give me feedback and ideas on the flow of the story. However, the guest chose not to test my process, and instead focused this formative assessment on the concept and art style of the project.

The comments my guests gave me made me think more deeply about the reasons behind my story (eg why did Alice enter Wonderland; why did Alice find herself mentally ill at the end; what does Wonderland represent in Alice's mind? Trauma?).

After receiving feedback and comments from the guest, I have a new direction and view on the concept and art style of this project. So I decided to change my original project concept and art style in week 11, and document the details of these new ideas in a new pitch deck (for presentation to lecturers in week 12). Other than that, regarding my art style, the guest felt that although I used cyberpunk and steampunk styles, they still looked very generic. So it was suggested that I explore the art style in the direction of my own painting style.

At the same time, I will continue to use the current prototype to continue. Since it takes me a lot of time to create a new project file, this is too risky. I will continue to use the core mechanic of Prototype 1, which is getting bigger and smaller. So there are a lot of things I can still reuse. But I needed to remodel the scene and some objects because those were made in the style of steampunk and cyberpunk.

Prototype 2.0

This prototype completes the flow from the Woods to the Hall. Although it was modified from the previous prototype, I added some scene changes to this new concept prototype, as well as added a new scene, which is Time Zone.

In the beginning, I didn't think too much about how to animate a bunch of items in the Rabbit Hole scene, so I just use the animation system in Unity to animate them. However, when the items come to many and many, it's quite tedious work to animate them one by one. And when I want to adjust their animation speed that is another tedious work. So I came up with a solution which creates 2 scripts - rotate animation script & item float up script. It's much easier to animate them ( I just need to put the 2 scripts on the item and adjust the value of their speed).

I created 9 different clock animations in AE. And export them, each animation has about 350 frames. Each PNG is 750x750 pixels. Playing 9 different animations at the same time is quite a heavy task. I tested it when I exported it as an APK file and installed it on the VR and it worked fine and smooth. But when trying to play with Unity, Unity will be very laggy. In order to run smoothly when testing files in Unity, instead of playing 9 different animations, I played 9 same animations in Unity.

On the other hand, I used outline shader on the 3D models in the Time Zone scene as the scene's art style. It works fine when I tested it on VR connected to a PC. But when exported as an APK and installed on the VR. The outline will not show in VR. So those models that used outline shader in the scene will be completely black. To achieve this kind of art style, I came up with a solution which is to make some extra polygons on the 3D model and apply white material to them.

Prototype 2.1

This prototype completes the flow from the Demonstrate Scene to The Flowers. The Demonstrate Scene is a teaching-like scene, where players can get a general idea of what Alice In Wonderland Syndrome is. Also, I made major changes to the Hall. Some new items have also been added to the hall, that is, equipment for viewing the senses.

Prototype 2.2

In this prototype, I completed the flow from the Demonstrate Scene to the tea party. I also completed some of the more detailed things in this prototype, such as the door will recognize whether the key that the player brought over is correct and some special effects when items appear and disappear. At the same time, the colors of this version of The Flowers will be closer to what I want. But not the final.

Prototype 2.3

I used this prototype as the submission for the first semester of my final year. This prototype added Hall instruction flow & fixed some bugs. And added scene effects in The Flowers and interactive feedback in Tea Party.

Prototype 2.5

I skipped 0.1 version because Prototype 2.4 basically just added 2 scenes which are the Rabbit House scene and the Alice Room scene. The prototype can go through the flow from start to end. Now Prototype 2.5 fixed some existing bugs, refined the flow in The Flowers scene, and refined the scene design in the Tea Party Scene. And also added some new interactions such as using a finger to rotate the clock's hand; punch a character in the Wood scene. 

p.s. This version didn't apply dialog, so all the dialog is just for temporary use.

Meanwhile, I tried to use teleportation instead of continuous movement but there are some technical issues so I haven't applied the teleportation in this version yet.

Prototype 2.5.1

This version fixed some bugs, added a portal effect on the background of the doors, applied teleportation and continuous movement filter (the player can switch the movement method), and applied the new dialog.

At the same time, I added a section for players to use their voices to interact with Mr. Caterpillar.