Alcaraz continued working on the Miku model, so on Day 9 I did some integration tests – this time using a .glb file meaning I didn’t have to do the manual material mapping – it worked pretty well.
June 5 – Alcaraz continued working on the 3d art, sending a じはんき (vending machine) to replace the blue cube I had put in the scene. It seems he’s going for a sweet painterly look.
He’s also working on improvements on Miku’s face, which was a bit scary in the previous model.
It’s time to go back to the project, we have less than a month to finish now.
Lately I’ve been thinking on ways to improve (or actually provide) some kind of gameplay loop; the “experience” is currently just too open-ended and hard to explain, so I’ve thought on actually making it a bit more “gamey” and integrated with the song lyrics.
So, there are two main elements to this: first one is attaching the current sentence of the song to the picture you are taking, kind of blending the memory of the song with the visual memory.
The other element is having the game “rate” your pictures depending on several factors, the idea is to try to have it consider several factors including:
- Variety, in general, taking duplicate pictures will have greatly diminishing scores.
- Pose: Miku’s pose (in case you are taking a photo of her)
- Visual things like good framing and lighting (probably will be hard to pull)
- Finally, integrating the lyrics into the equation; some cool lyrics will also up the value of the photo.
Your camera also has a limited cartridge, so it becomes a challenge of how many cool pictures you can take with a 24 photos box.
In order for that to work, I figured I needed to add some additional challenges and some UX improvements; the challenge factor will come from the fact that Miku teleports automatically and randomly so you, as the photographer, have to keep an eye out for cool photo opportunities.
As for the UX improvements, I added a “Call Miku” command which you could use if you wanted her to look at you for the picture; I’m thinking of probably different kind of inputs which may cause a different reaction from Miku… maybe.
I also made it so that the player remains in photo mode so they can shoot multiple at the time, because only one shot was a bit cumbersome.
Some additional tweaks made beyond the scoring and gaming included fixing the current teleportation effect which was just tweening the opacity of the materials which exposed the internal geometry of the model and looked uneven when there were many overlapping materials, so I changed that to use a shader instead which dithers out the rendered model completely. I also did a fix to Clear lyrics and reset renderer memory on song change.
I’ve been discussing with Alcaraz the possibility of allowing the player to roam the scene in first person view and take the pictures; doable technically but probably very demanding on the art side– we are measuring ourselves to see what we can do.
Slashie's Gamedev Adventures 