Reasons for Revision
For Food Fight, one of our goals was to create a new engaging environment that will captivate players. The current environment was distracting and confusing to the player, as well as having a few assets that seem misplaced and lacked cohesion. When thinking of how to revise and improve this, we knew that the new environment had to be consistent and make sense within the game-play. Our goals were also to improve the lighting, assets, and over-all feel. With the new environment, it had to allow for natural lighting. This would bring the quality of the game up and would better the players’ experience in VR.
New Environment Options
To address the new environmental needs, I came up with three different locations to consider: a food court, a high school cafeteria, and a house made of junk food.
Food Court
The benefits to the food court are that it can have natural lighting, options for many various foods, and is a common place people can go. The food court is also beneficial in that the assets needed are not too extreme or complex and they could be re-used. We could also incorporate using objects around the player, like tables and chairs, to make bigger shields and help keep the player in one area (the center or off to the side) instead of allowing free range. This will help with motion sickness since, if the player is stationary and can only move their head, it limits the possibility for the VR to become disorienting to the player. In future games, if we wanted the player to move around more than the limited area we allowed originally, that is still an option.
High School Cafeteria
Benefits to the high school cafeteria are that most people have been to some sort of school cafeteria in their lives and it has options for different foods. The high school also reaches most of the target audience, which is younger players. With our target audience in mind, the school cafeteria is a good example where people are faced with making healthy food choices – lots of food options allow for different food assets in gameplay. The assets would be simple and easy to integrate within the larger environment.
Junk House
The junk house was meant to give the player an escape from reality by using VR. It was to be a fun and relaxing time where the player can play the game and enjoy all the colorful surroundings while escaping into a new and interesting world. The goal of the junk house was to teach the player without them feeling like they were being taught. With the happy, skewed world of the environment, players would play and not realize that their good actions in the game could also help them outside the game. When they go to buy food, they would remember the bright colors and the fun game and might think twice about eating bad food for them.
Concept Phase
Because of its many benefits, we decided to move forward with the food court environment. We will not have to change the assets to anything too complex and we can make visual improvements in the overall game-play to create a more cohesive experience.
We are currently moving from the concept phase to the details stage of rendering. As we progress, I look forward to integrating the new environment into Food Fight and seeing how users respond to these improvements!
You can read more about Food Fight on the game website, or download the game for free on the Oculus store.
