Download link for android build
Description
Virtual Swamp Animals, supported by Google Cardboard, depicts the food chain in a swamp. Experience life as a pond skater, frog, and a hawk and interact with your environment with a full range of head movements. The goal of the game is to consume creatures lower on the food chain than yourself, and then experience moving up the food chain into a higher position. The experience has added properties that simulate involvement in the environment, such as the presence of background noise, interactive sounds that the user triggers, and nearby stimuli that give the impression of a coexisting ecosystem.
Motivation
We based our motivation for the game off of the idea that a first person view could depict something other than a person. Our idea eventually developed into a method of depicting a scene in nature a person could never experience: participating in a food chain as the animal itself. We found articles and readings that describe this unique experience a person could never physically go through, such as this VR example entitled "Configurable semi-autonomic animated animal characters in interactive virtual reality applications". This paper describes the importance of having a simple implementation of real-time animal animations that are configurable to make user interaction simple.
Technical explanation of the project
Our project consists of movement of a player at a constant rate with interactions with neighboring assets, which are consumed when the player reaches the outer range of the boundaries set on the asset. Once hit, the asset will disappear. Around the end of each animal's two minute time-span, they will be consumed by a higher predator (in our terms, toggled to the next organism in the higher slot) and be put into that higher animal's perspective. Our toggling gameplay between objects is utilized through a timer script that organizes objects by labels and marks them as "edible", "TwoMins", etc, that describe the function and their time to disappear when referenced in the script. Additionally, our project makes use of audioClips and sound related resources that add to the involvement and impact of the user on their environment.
Game Screenshots
Gameplay Video
7 minute Youtube Video - 6 minute of the experience followed by 1 minute explaining technical components View a video of gameplay at this link.
Authors and Contributors
@marieurmano, @reidgill, and @EvanMAmstutz worked on this project in Spring 2016 for the University of Florida's Virtual Reality class taught by Benjamin Lok. Marie made the pond skater, frog, hawk, and lily pad models in Maya 2015 with default shading resources and created the animation schema for the respective animals with smooth binding and paint weights.
References
We utilized some models for our unity project. Listed below are the people credited for creating these aspects of our game.
Rotation of prey script from Bluntweapon, edited a bit to include rotation and speed of movement
Swamp Encounter Map designed by Small
Unity Roll-A-Ball Tutorial interactions with rotating squares in scene
Audio Clip in Audio Source provided by Kamil