This is the DevLog of the Collaborative Unit project, the phone booth.
Members:
Abhimanyu Chattopadhyay
James Grey
Yantao Tang
Filip Norkowski
Week 1 – 2, Team up
Absy wants to make a realistic phone booth, and the rest of us want to try something we haven’t tried before, and after discussing, we agreed that VR could be a good idea. And we then consider the objective of this project is to create a short narrative experience in VR that explores mental health and depression.
Week 3 – 4, First-phase preparation
We decided to use Unity to develop our project. This is mainly because we all have experience with unity and we can always ask school teachers for help. Then, we decided to use the Universal Render Pipeline over Unity’s Standard Renderer to achieve the desired performance for our game because it provides artist-friendly workflows that let you quickly and easily create optimized graphics across a range of platforms.
At the end of January, we create a telegram group for communication, a GitHub project for collaboration without compromising the integrity of the original project, and a confluence page to manage the process.
Then, we split the projects into tasks, and everyone focuses on researching the different areas. James would deal with the VR interaction, Absy would focus on the dialogue system, Filip would look into the narratives and I would build the 3D model and research about the light effect. All the tasks are updated on the confluence page so that we could all manage the process of the project.
Also, before we officially start doing this project, we were looking for some games and other stuff to find some inspiration. For example, ‘You Will (Not) Remain’, which could give players a brief, quiet and deep experience. Its hopeless and lovecraftian atmosphere helps the player to connect better with the main character’s feeling of emptiness and its interaction with the enclosed world where it lives. Considering our gameplay would also happen in a limited space phone booth and the narrative theme of this game is similar to ours, we could get good pointers from the game.
Week 3, 3D Model of Phone Box
I never made a 3d model before, and I’m very interested in doing that. I chose to make it in Blender 3.0 because it’s free and powerful, and friendly to beginners due to a large number of online tutorials. Gladly, I found a tutorial about making a phone box model in Blender.
However, there are still lots of difficulties by just following that. The biggest problem is, the person who made this tutorial is using shortcuts all the time without any hints, this makes it very difficult to catch what happened. To deal with it, I need to read the user manual to get familiar with the shortcuts in Bender, to understand every function. The second problem is, this tutorial was based on Blender 2.8, and I’m currently planning to use Blender 3.0. The update brings a bunch of differences, such as UI and some functions being removed or replaced. This asked me to research more about modelling. But anyways, this tutorial provides lots of information about making a phone box.
This model contains a door, outside structure, inside structure and a phone pad.
There are unfinished ideas among them. For example, the material selection of the phone booth, I initially wanted to use a specific material to make the phone booth look more ancient, but considering that the same shader may be applied to the entire project and the art style of the entire project, so I did not implement it. Another unfinished idea is that I initially wanted to put some stickers on the phone booth, like “telephone”, or some icons like a crown, which is on the realistic phone booth in London.
Also, during this week, we further discussed the goal for our project, and we finally decided to make our project a VR narrative game, talk about the stigma around depression to bring awareness about taking care of this group of people around us. While playing this game, players would be able to call friends and family, then choose the conversations. And the results of choices would impact the environment visually.
Week 4 – 5, Lighting and online presentation
We want to build a scene wherein a dark street the player can only see the phone booth under the spotlight. In this way, we wanted to insinuate the player to the phone booth while creating a depressing atmosphere. So, making a volumetric light is necessary. Also, we want to make the VR experience more realistic, so I further decided to research the fog effect.
There is an open sources project on GitHub about volumetric lighting, including volumetric fog, area lights and tube lights. This project is not supported for the URP project, however, it inspired me that in our project, we could have a light beam with local fog and add global fog noise to the scene, to make our project more realistic. Also, this GitHub project points out that, the final outcome of light scattering in the fog depends on three factors: fog density, fog anisotropy and light sources, which is very helpful for further work.
Also, an online post helps me a lot make a volumetric light scattering effect. It mainly talks about the physics knowledge of light, the method of creating a custom renderer feature and adding the Render Feature to the Forward Renderer.
With those knowledgeable, we are able to make the light and fog effect based on the script template provided by URP and then custom it. We are able to change the colour of the light, the intensity, scale, and velocity of the fog (3D noise) as we want.
Although we achieved volumetric light, there are still shortcomings. The most obvious problem is that the noise is evenly distributed in the volume, which means that the brightness at the border of the volume light is almost the same as when it is in the centre, which creates a problem when the player walks into the beam, the brightness will change suddenly. We want this change could be slow so that makes the scene more realistic. The easiest solution is to stack multiple beams of varying intensity and volume to achieve this effect, which then increases the load on the scene considerably. The knowledge of light and the script of volume light should be further studied.
Week 6 – 7, Merges, first playtest, and sound
The most important thing in these two weeks is merging all the stuff together so that we have a playable version of the project for testing. An error occurred during the merge because we were working on the same script in the same branch, and GitHub couldn’t automatically merge the two files efficiently. It took us 1 hour to fix. This mistake tells us that we should work on different branches when cooperating, and at the same time, always pull before the push.
Then we had our first official playtest with a bunch of people. The feedbacks mainly are:
- Players unfamiliar with VR feel difficult to control.
- The UI is on the low side, making it difficult for some players to find the dialogue system. At the same time, the location of the phone is high, and it is difficult for some players to pick up the phone.
- Once they figure out how to interact with objects in the scene, players will enjoy doing things like throwing their phone, picking it up, and pressing buttons on the dial.
- People are prone to errors when entering numbers, and the process of resetting an input can quickly become tedious.
To deal with these problems that were made:
- We needed the player to notice the Dialogue UI so we placed it within the player’s eye-line while they are interacting with the phone.
- We spaced out interactable elements like the buttons on the dial pad so players would be less likely to make mistakes if they were not precise with their actions.
Also, We had a meeting with students from the Sound Design course at LCC. They are happy to work with us to add a variety of sound and music to the game to make it an enriching experience.
Week 8, Shader
For the past few weeks, we’ve been discussing which shader to choose. In the beginning, we chose the Flat Kit shader because we thought the outline script it came with would be a good way to help us outline the shape and appearance of objects. We tried various visuals and styles, but nothing came out of it. Finally, Absy proposed to use the Quibli shader in addition to the flat kit with his amazing ideas.
So the material on the objects is of Quibli shader, and that shader has a very binary interaction with light. So even in a little light, it looks clear and bright and colourful. But with no light, it’s super dark. And the player can’t see anything. Then on top of that, we are using Flat Kits Forward Rendering to do the outline effect with black colour.
So when it is unlit everything is black and dark so is the outline, the player can’t see anything. But the lit objects like the phonebooth are visible and have colour, then when players are inside the phone booth and look outside, they are looking at the objects through that fog effect from the light beam. And that fog effect has a yellow/brown colour, and because players can see the outline through the fog effect, players would see the environment when they are inside the fog.
The outline is always there it’s just that they can’t see it because everything is the same colour. But when players are in the spotlight and looking through the layer of fog, it becomes visible.
Week 9 – 10, Second playtest, presentation on Collectives
From the last two weeks, we decided not to prevent from making a big change in our project, but focus on improving what we’ve done and fixing the problems we haven’t solved or forgotten such as removing the teleport function.
We had our second playtest, and also we took our project to collectives, gave a presentation for other courses students. We received a lot of good reviews, mainly talking about the visual effect and functionality.
At the same time, we realised that nobody pays attention to emotional expression, which should be the objective of this project.
Conclusion
First of all, I am very happy that the four of us successfully completed this project and gained some recognition. In this project, we conducted research in areas that were both unfamiliar and interesting to us. We learned about VR, physics, lighting, modelling, storytelling, and shaders. At the same time, we have also gained experience in the production of team projects. We learned to manage the process of the project, to more effectively complete a job with multiple people, and to share the knowledge that may be used. At the same time, I am also very grateful to my three team members for their dedication to this project, and give me help when I need it.
We got some good reviews for this project, but we also feel pity that we had some ideas that we didn’t achieve. First of all, from the feedback from the test, everyone is very interested in the visual effect, art style, and functionality of this project. I personally also like the style of art presented in this project. Unfortunately, our original intention for this project was to hope that people would pay more attention to mental health, and our scenes and lighting were designed to accentuate the depressing atmosphere of the story. The truth is, the narrative of this project was not that good because we were not good at storytelling and we didn’t spend more time researching and writing stories. Narratives can be studied more in later studies. At the same time, in future projects, the narrative can be divided into more time proportions.
Anyway, I am very happy with this collaborative unit, we at least successfully completed this project. I also tried things I hadn’t tried before, like VR and modelling.
Finally, thanks again to Absy, James, and Filip.