Gameplay Storyline

Loveland used to be an enchanted forest full of love and magic and rainbows. A bad witch called Society put a curse in the enchanted forest that left the forest almost drained from all magic. A bit of magic is still left but in order to unlock all the magic the forest used to have, the secret chest must be opened.

Main goal of the player: To find the closed chest and open it so that the rainbow is released and the forest becomes fully enchanted.

MOODBOARD

In my VR experience:

The rainbow is a common pattern/theme in my experience.

I have also added blue flowers to represent blue gladiolis.

The lavender color as well more colors from all the queer flags are used as color palette for the design of the VR environment and gameobjects.

The labrys is used in one interaction in the experience.

The theme of love is persistent throughout the VR experience.

Mapping the terrain of the experience in Unity using a heightmap

The path is an acronym of LGBTQ+

Audio Types in the experience

The first one is a soundtrack that will play as soon as the experience begins. The soundtrack will be on loop throughout the experience and on lower volume so that it does not disturb the rest of the sounds playing on top of it when needed. The soundtrack is called "Tribe of the Lost Rainforest" by Brandon Fiechter.

The second type of audio is an explanatory voiceover of the symbols that exist in the experience. More specifically, my experience is a journey of engaging with the Queer community and understanding the historical connections of mythology and the queer community. This enchanted forest is full of objects that represent something in the Queer community or in queer mythology and that is why I decided to add explanatory narration on these symbols every time the player encounters a significant object/symbol.

The third type of audio is voiceover explanations of interactions. The experience has a variety of different spots where the player has to interact in some sort of way with the environment. Although the interactions are all pretty simple and based on the standard collision/trigger interaction (apart from teleportation) the experience does not allow for a learning curve because of its small duration nor does it include introductory tutorials on how to act when a certain type of object shows up. That is why I added short voiceovers every time the player needs to interact with the environment. The voiceovers are recorded in such a way where I do not provide answers on what to press and what to do exactly with the controllers, instead they are more "command like" audios. For example, I do not say "grab the heart with the controller, teleport close to the lion, touch the heart to the lion", instead I say "feed the heart to the lion". I believe that this type of voiceover gives feedback to the player that there is an interaction in place but it also challenges the player to figure it out by him/herself. -(be in the right place in the flow chart)

Experimenting with Emoji Feedback to aid navigation of the player

The fact that the player does not have a 2D map to have an idea of where they are headed might be confusing. The player might spend hours trying to figure out where the chest is to open it and they might be doing circles for hours. That is why I decided to give some sort of feedback to the player every time they are somewhat headed in the right direction - inspired by the game of hot and cold we used to play as kids.
I designed a 2D simple happy face emoji on illustrator and added it as an appearing/disappearing particle effect in the experience depending on the direction the player is teleporting to.

Fall 2020