Capstone Scope Reduction

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:

  1. Scale achievement: Trees, rocks and buildings appropriately scaled (100)
  2. Animation achievement: Create animation for bird in bird flocks (100)
  3. Lighting achievement: Use a mix of baked and real-time lighting, sun is baked, torches are real time (100)
  4. Locomotion achievement: Develop walk in place mechanic (100)
  5. Physics achievement: Water effects utilize physics, the player is kept on the terrain using gravity. (maybe throwing stick for a dog?–removed) (100)

Completeness:

  1. Gamification achievement: Player purchases environment enhancements using steps (250)
  2. AI achievement: Birds will flock when scared out of tree. (250)
  3. 3D Modeling achievement: Create low poly bird model (250)

Challenges:

  1. User Testing achievement: (250)x2

 

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