作者： ichiv.0zv

Mortise Mirage

Genre:

VR Puzzle

Tools:

Unity

Platform:

Meta Quest

Team:

Shuting Lei

Yijun Ma

Yixuan Wang

Ziwei Niu

Overview

Mortise Mirage is a VR immersive 3D puzzle game with ancient ink wash painting and traditional mortise and tenon woodwork as its main cultural themes. In this game, players will experience the assembly process of traditional mortise and tenon wooden objects in the artistic conception of landscape painting using their hands, feeling the craftsmanship and joy imbued with rich Eastern cultural imagery.

In the current demo release, players will be the first to experience the mortise and tenon assembly process of a Chinese traditional sampan. Based on the examination of traditional Chinese wooden boat structures and boat model examples, we designed handcrafted models, aiming to faithfully recreate the structural craftsmanship of traditional wooden boats. While players enjoy the immersive fun of 3D puzzle-solving, they can also explore the craftsmanship wisdom passed down through millennia embodied in a small boat.

Gameplay Flow

Highlights

  • Puzzle assembly: Mortise Mirage provides players with a unique immersive experience of being surrounded by puzzle pieces in three-dimensional space, enhancing the enjoyment and novelty of puzzle-solving.
  • Educational Value: Mortise Mirage faithfully reproduces the appearance and structural features of woodworking heritage, allowing players to experience the ingenuity of real mortise and tenon woodworking while playing.
  • Aesthetic and immersive atmosphere: The game masterfully combines dim light, creepy sound effects, scary monsters, lens and environment VFX. All these elements blend together to create a palpably dark world.

Gameplay

“Mortise Mirage” is the first VR 3D puzzle game focused on traditional Chinese mortise-and-tenon joinery, offering a cultural, immersive assembly experience with high fidelity to the woodworking art form and expandable content. Set in an ink-wash “Ink Realm,” it blends music and interactive design for a tranquil exploration of Chinese culture while engaging in 3D puzzles. Leveraging Quest hand tracking, it delivers a novel puzzle-solving experience. The game authentically represents the woodworking craft, educating players on the cultural heritage. Its mechanics allow for future inclusion of various wooden cultural artifacts, showing significant expansion potential.

Development Process

Firstly, we choose to use Meta All-in-one as the foundation of the project, which is more convenient for future direct packaging on Quest devices and native running. It comes with gesture tracking and related interfaces, making it easier to directly control through gestures and XR mode in the future, avoiding to some extent the disruption of immersion by controllers.

In the core assembly part of the game, scripts determine whether an object is correctly installed based on its distance and angle from the target position. If correctly installed, sound effects and visual effects will be played. When an entire section is assembled, level management scripts will traverse all required objects to check if each piece is in its correct position before deciding whether or not to proceed to the next stage.

When all stages are completed, a transparent model of the final product will appear. At this point players need to assemble each part onto their target positions; currently judgement logic still relies on angles and distances but may include assembly order requirements in future iterations so as to replicate traditional mortise-and-tenon assembly processes. Once complete, finished products move into display positions where interactive operations can be performed.

My Contributions

As the only interaction engineer for the project, I was responsible for the implementation of all player actions, level logic, and procedural animations. I was also responsible for communicating with the art team on how to place the assets, and ultimately adjusting the placement and fixing procedural issues that occurred when referencing other materials.

From configuring the VR interaction basics, stitching adsorption functions, model integrity judgement, UI interaction, and procedural animation, I independently completed almost all of the scripts for the gameplay sections.

Firstly on the tiling attachments, I use distance and angle to determine if the player is moving the block to the target position at the correct angle.

Then in the level logic, each block has a bool value to show if it’s finished splicing and determines if it’s finished by iterating through all the blocks in the current stage, and triggering a script to switch stages if it’s done.

The switching stage script contains sound and effect triggers and calls the method to go to the next stage.

When grabbing a block, the player is alerted to the current block being grabbed by the outer outline.

Upon completion of the game, the player travels by boat to the next island for subsequent levels to be developed. To simulate the feeling of the boat floating, I used DOTween to animate the route as well as simulate the floating effect.

I also created a lot of functional scripts, such as complete menus, random generation of floating decorations within the scene, etc., as well as scripts to control background music playback, adjusting volume, block floating, and block movement to a target location. Scripts that required additional art materials and sound effects were not implemented into the project due to project cycle issues, but can be viewed on the GitHub page.

Future Plan

Firstly, the assembly touch needs to be optimized. Try to use physical simulation for assembly and optimize the feedback effects of assembly. At present, only starting from sound effects and visual effects cannot bring enough immersive effect in virtual reality, which needs further optimization.

Secondly, more levels are needed for a richer interactive experience with various buildings and objects such as wooden umbrellas, pavilions, covered bridges. The scope of mortise and tenon is very wide. Due to our limited energy and time at this stage, we can’t provide a richer assembly experience but it leaves more room for the future of this project.

Apart from assembling mortise-and-tenon joints also involve disassembling them like traditional tools such as Luban lock. Disassembling mortise-and-tenon structures can bring another angle of fun to the game.

As for the collection system currently due to limited level numbers and insufficient content it’s unable to give users enough sense of achievement. After adding more levels/items in the future they can be showcased collectively towards users.

Refections

How I met my aims?

My goal in this project was to assist in the design of VR-friendly puzzle game interactions and implement all tests in Unity and achieve the desired functionality. Achieving this utilised my knowledge of Virtual Reality, Game Design and Development, Meta ALL-IN-ONE SDK and Unity. After joining the group we had a very clear division of labour and I, as the more programmatically and Unity savvy member of the team, undertook almost all of the development and implemented all of the core functionality and achieved good results in procedural animation.

Firstly, for the basic mortise and tenon pickup, I used the Meta SDK’s own prefabs to implement it, and after initial testing and team discussion, we decided to use gesture recognition throughout, which can be adapted to new interaction methods very quickly.

Next, for the mortise-and-tenon splicing feature, I considered the performance limitations of the VR all-in-one machine. I referred to online tutorials and the guidance of the TA, but I didn’t find any ready-made solutions suitable for our project, so I first tried to implement the splice detection on the desktop platform, and then tested it in the VR all-in-one machine, and finally chose a solution with relatively low performance requirements.

In terms of the level detection function, I tried to use a traversal algorithm to check whether each square is in the right position, and gradually display the subsequent levels to ensure that the level flow is not wrong. For the level switching part, I created a fade-in/fade-out script to avoid the player’s feeling of vertigo due to sudden scene switching, but it could not be triggered stably when running standalone in a VR headset.

In terms of procedural animation, I used a plug-in to achieve the effect of decorations floating and fading, simulating the floating effect of a boat on the water, and achieved good results.

In terms of other interactions, the menu is the part I still haven’t solved, after making poke menus according to Meta’s official documentation, there are always cases where they are not detected, and in some cases, it can run normally on Windows platform using Oculus Runtime, but after installing it to the All-in-One PC it may need to be repeatedly operated to be triggered, which is still an unresolved issue at the moment.

Overall, I’ve gained a lot of development experience on this project, and it’s not the first time I’ve taken on the sole programming role on the team, but it’s by far the most complex programming project I’ve been responsible for. Since the Meta SDK has just been updated and the online tutorials are almost all outdated, I was able to solve a lot of problems independently by going through the documentation, which will help me a lot when I face more complex projects in the future. Due to time constraints, we tried to recreate as much as possible the framework of the game as we envisioned it at the beginning, providing a complete mortise-and-tenon joinery experience for the user, but there is still a lot of room for improvement in terms of details.

What were my challenges? How did I face them?

First of all, Meta just updated its SDK at the beginning of the year, the APIs for getting user input and object status have changed, and the official documentation does not explain each excuse and the examples are relatively simple.

I first used the documentation to identify the required excuses, then isolated the required scripts from the sample scenarios to learn by imitation, then used ChatGPT to assist in explaining the inheritance relationship of the scripts and the function and effect of each line of code, and finally tested them with my own functional scripts.

The UI interaction of the Meta SDK is also a problem, although the toolkit provides the option to quickly mount scripts for Unity Canvas, it is not able to detect hand collisions correctly.

I used the official template as a base, first adding a working UnityCanvas prefab, then testing it level by level to find the part that implements the functionality, then replacing the display part with the image we created, adjusting the position to achieve our goal

This is not a permanent solution, and in the future it will be necessary to find parts of the UI code that interact correctly with the Quest SDK in order to adapt it to more functional menus that may appear in the future!

Findy Hunter

Genre:

AR

Platform:

Snapshot

Tools:

Lens Studio

Team:

Diana Kaiutina

Jintao Yu

Li Huang

Yu Zhang

Ziwei Niu

Project Overview

Findy Hunty offers an interactive and educational experience at Fordham Park that blends AR technology with nature. Designed to appeal to younger users and families, it guides users to explore different corners of the park, adding a sense of user interaction through gesture recognition as they learn about nature.

Despite choosing to use Snapchat as a platform, it is special in that it has different stages that require more interaction to get the experience, not just a filter.

Concept

Findy Hunter is inspired by Meta Interactions like Treasure Hunter, and now similar apps like Geocaching. users move from place to place and discover items hidden by other users through a series of prompts.

The final app utilizes AR technology to present a unique storyline in the park, including different scenes where there are different interactions, such as knowledge quizzes and gesture dialogues, each of which guides the user to the next location.

User Experience

In Findy Hunty, users start their journey by finding markers in Fordham Park, helping the elves in different locations to solve their problems, learning about nature while advancing the story through fun interactions. Since the target audience is children and families, the journey focuses on the user’s activities in real space and there is no consequence for failure.

Personal Contribution

I have a background in game design and production, so I took on the role of engineer on the project.

However, since most of my experience has been with Unity and Unreal Engine, and I don’t know much about Javascript, my main job was to integrate art and sound resources made by other students, place them in the editor scene, and then use Behavior script to solve logical problems, such as dialog and option logic, animation, sound effect playback and switch timing, and custom gesture recognition.

Reflection

We at Findy Hunter successfully combined AR technology with environmental education to provide users with a new way to explore the park, although there is still much room for improvement.

This project was a bold attempt for me, and although the results were not as good as I would have expected, I also learned valuable lessons from the team and gained a deeper understanding of AR technology and user experience design.

From my point of view, Mixed Reality (MR) is more in accordance with my expectation of this project, adding more interactive content on top of AR, expanding the user experience from the phone screen to the real world instead of just adding a layer of virtual filters to the real world, and the interaction process is necessary and really affects the user.

In terms of user experience, three students from UXE Design program made a detailed plan for user interaction, target experience, and required materials, which I had not experienced before in designing games that focused on mechanics and gameplay, and it benefited me a lot. However, due to our limited communication at this stage, the volume of interactions got out of control and we did not have a good sense of what to expect.nt.

At the beginning of the project design, I imagined this to be an application with AR as the medium and realistic interaction as the core. Users are guided through a fun game to explore the park and learn about real stories that have happened in the park. The target users might be teenagers in the neighborhood of the park who often come to the park and the park is a part of their life, but don’t know how it became what it is today and what stories have happened in the park.

After discussion, however, the team chose to use Lens Studio in order to create a stand-alone application for Snapshot, a platform with a much larger user base, rather than Unity, in order to focus on the main goal of distribution.

Because of the bad choice of platform, we encountered a lot of unexpected problems during the actual production process, such as ignoring the space occupied by Snapshot’s UI when we need to use buttons to interact with it, adding another layer of interactive buttons makes it look messy, and affecting the smoothness of Snapshot when there are too many art resources for the three scenes.

Overall, this project was full of surprises and challenges for me, but it also brought me a lot of help, both in terms of team communication and user experience. Through learning Lens Studio, I have also gained a better understanding of AR technology, which is crucial to my career developme

Finite Space

Genre:

Action

Tools:

Unity & PhotoShop

Platform:

WebGL

Team:

Yixuan Wang(Reddy)

Ziwei Niu(Alex)

Game Overview

Hey! Soldier! Here’s your mission!

There’s a big wave of asteroids coming your way!

Collect resources and build equipment to protect your spaceship!

Survive and collect as many resources as possible. Don’t let me down!

Features：

  • Only can move in a limited space🛸
  • Combine resources to get more resources🖱️
  • Different equipment can be set🛠️

💥💥💥

Do you want a challenge?  Try not to use WASD to move your spaceship!

Have fun 🙂 

Gameplay Flow

Slay the Spire

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

Slay the Spire is a card-based Roguelike game created and published by Mega Crit Games. It combines deck building and Rogue gameplay, encouraging players to combine their decks based on randomly appearing cards and relics to defeat the enemies in the spire.

The game is inherited from Dream Quest, developed by Peter Whalen, but optimized on its strong randomness to create a highly strategic gameplay experience for players using monster intent and clear card effects. In its wake, countless followers have flocked to this niche genre, and now the card-based Rouge has become an extremely large segment of the gaming community.

2. Making Random Strategic

At the 1989 GDC, game design master Sid Meier said:

“A game is a series of interesting decisions”

Slay the Spire succeeds precisely because it offers players a predictable choice of strategies to crack difficult levels with calculation, no matter the difficulty. This kind of thinking is exactly what makes for interesting decisions.

I think there are often two types of randomness in strategy Rouge: chance random and strategy random.

Chance Random

Random chance means that the player makes a choice first and later sees a random result.

For example, with mechanics such as character hit and critic rates in XCOM, the player has at least 3 outcomes after giving an attack command to a character.

  1. the attack hits, dealing normal damage.

  2. the attack hits, dealing bludgeoning damage.

  3. the attack missed.

The player is unable to accurately predict the outcome before the character acts, which can result in the entire course of the battle changing due to this one random circumstance.

Rouge games often have limited resources and the player consumes resources with every action, creating what must be a poor gaming experience if the correct strategy may randomly travel as a result.

Strategy Random

Strategy random means that the game generates random challenges or puzzles, and the player chooses his or her own determined expectations based on these challenges.

For example, in Into the Breach, the location of monster generation is random, but the player can clearly see the intent of each enemy, the location and type of new enemy that will appear on the next turn, and thus control the character to execute the optimal strategy of his or her choice.

This type of randomness is similar to gaming in a chess game, but instead of having to evolve the opponent’s possible choices, the player simply uses the limited leverage his side has to solve the upcoming problem. However, it still requires a great deal of calculation at each move, increasing the burden of thought on the player.

Killing Spire is a clever combination of two random mechanics, as players build decks from randomly appearing cards and then use them strategically to solve puzzles based on the battlefield.

This doesn’t mean that the cards don’t have random effects, but the presence of random luck means that it adds to the fun of the game. There are a handful of cards that cause random effects for each profession in the game, but they mostly affect situations where you are fighting more with less, and they don’t randomise negative effects.

3. Core Mechanisms

3.1 Strategy

3.1.1 Limited Resource Assignment

In traditional strategy games, players need to manage and administer the resources they collect in a limited amount of time to win, but one defeat does not mean the end of the game, as long as they can continue to collect resources, they will always have a chance to turn the game around.

In Strategy Rouge, the length of a single game is fixed, which means that the player’s resources are fixed, and all of the player’s strategic choices will revolve around the limited resources, i.e. the strategy is the solution to the allocation of those resources.

In Slay the Spire, players have 4 types of resources：

  • Card: Cards are the strategies available to players when they engage in battle.
  • Gold: Gold is a resource for players to buy items from merchants or to unlock higher level options in random events.
  • Potion: Potions are one-time items that assist players in battle.
  • HP: HP is a resource that players can choose to exchange in battle, and also affects some of the options for random events.

There are also relics, which are items that enhance the player’s character’s abilities, but it is almost impossible for the player to spend them in exchange for resources, so they are not classified as allocatable resources.

3.1.2 Map

In Slay the Spire, players can choose different routes to the boss room at the bottom of the level.

At the start of each game, the player first obtains a complete map of the entire level, estimates the potential rewards based on the different types of rooms on the map, and selectively exchanges resources to defeat the final boss and win the game.

Six types of rooms are shown on the map：

Merchant
Spend gold to acquire cards, relics or potions; spend gold to remove cards.
Random Events
Random appearance of other types of rooms or special events.
Rest Site
Restoring blood; strengthening cards (special relics will offer extra options)
Treasure
Obtaining relics
Monsters
Spend blood to gain cards, gold and potions
Elite Monsters
Spend blood to gain cards, gold, relics and potions

3.1.3 Combat

Combat is the part of Slay the Spire that players have to face as they move forward, and it’s fair to say that everything players do to prepare for combat in the game is in service of it.

The victory condition is that all enemy lives are reduced to 0. The defeat condition is that the player’s life is reduced to 0. The flow of the battle can be simplified as:

There are very few ways to restore life points in the game, so the player’s strategic choices for balancing the character’s attack and defence in each turn are in effect resource management of the character’s life points.

The composition of the deck will directly affect the strategies available to the player in this section. At the same time, the enemy’s intentions for the next turn are displayed in battle, encouraging players to choose the best strategy to break the situation.

3.2 Deck Building

3.2.1 Strength dimensions

In battle, players need to spend a fixed amount of energy each turn to play cards to their effect. As a game with strategy at its core, it is extremely important that Slay the Spire is numerically balanced.

There are 367 cards in the game, with 75 exclusive cards for each of the four professions Silent,Defect,Ironclad and Watcher, 53 colourless cards common to all professions and 14 cursed cards.

Depending on the effect, the cards available to the player can be divided into four categories: damage, defence, card draw and energy.

After counting the effects of all the cards, it was calculated that the expected standard values for each type of card effect are directly linked to the energy consumption, and that the values of all the cards do not deviate too much from the standard values：

Energy Cost

0

1

2

3

Damage

6

11

18

32

Block

4

9

16

Card Draw

1.5

3

In addition:

  • Cards that are stronger than standard are often accompanied by negative effects/additional release conditions

  • Cards that are weaker than standard often have other positive effects/can create more effects with other cards

  • Colorless cards will be slightly higher than the Pro Deck standard value for their rarity

At the same time, the weak initial card strength of each character encourages players to use cards acquired during the game, and forces them to trigger more combinations between cards when facing enemies with several times stronger life values than their characters later on.

3.2.1 Card System

Cards are the player’s strategic options in battle, and the more strategic they are, the more complex the player will be able to deal with the situation.

For this reason, instead of including a large number of rare cards with extensive text descriptions, Slay the Spire simplifies card functions and then enriches them with linking effects. The player community refers to these effects as combos, and cards that can form combos are referred to as a card system.

Statistics on the popular systems for each profession reveal that the designers offer a wealth of strategic options for each profession.

There are four types of characters in the game, each with three basic card systems.

Ironclad

  • Strength (emphasis on damage)
  • Blocking (emphasis on defence)
  • Depletion (emphasis on energy recovery)

 

Silent

  • Poison (emphasis on attack)
  • Knife (emphasis on attack)
  • Discard (Energy Recovery & Card Draw)

Defect

  • Lightning Ball (emphasis on attack)
  • Frostball (emphasis on defence)
  • Dark Ball (defence and card draw)

Watcher

  • Reserved (emphasis on card draw)
  • Stance (attack and energy recovery)
  • Foresight (emphasis on card draw)

As you can see, each card system enhances 1-2 aspects of a character’s ability, but winning battles requires a balance of players’ abilities in four areas: damage, defence, card draw and energy, which requires players to match up and build different systems to win the ultimate victory.

The clear and easy-to-calculate card effects successfully create a unique experience that guides players in forming their own strategies in a random variety of ways.

4. Enhancing the Experience

Slay the Spire creates a random world rich in strategy and enhances the player’s strategic choice experience with clear hints of monster intent and a card system that transforms functions to help players make sense of the battle and turn the tide.

  • Visual cues for monster intent

      • Monster intent shows the enemy’s next system in a straightforward manner, helping players to quickly understand the battle situation

      • In the original beta version, this feature required players to click on each enemy to read text cues to understand their intent, which was improved to an iconic display as it was complex and difficult to understand

      • There are 15 types of icons for monster intent, depending on the damage and effect, and the damage value is displayed directly on the icon

      • If the enemy’s actions cause a compound effect, the icons will overlap and there are 12 types of compound icons

      • The monster itself animates differently depending on the intent

0-4 damage
5-9 damage
10-14 damage
15-19 damage
20-24 damage
25-29 damage
30+ damage
Block
Negative Effect
powerful Negative Effect
Use a Buff
Escape
Asleep
Stunned
Not any of the above

      • The following outcomes are possible when the enemy’s intentions are unknown：

          • Splitting.

          • Exploding

          • Summoning Minion.

          • Changing form.

          • Reviving itself.

          • Doing nothing.

  • Card design outside the system

      • When a player chooses a card system that is severely lacking in a certain function, they can choose a card that is severely over-valued in the missing function but has harsh conditions of use to complement the weaknesses of their library, giving players a wider range of strategic options

      • Players can choose cards that convert an ability into another type of ability, such as Body Slam: Deal damage equal to your Block, which converts a defensive ability into a damage ability

      • Colorless cards are difficult to form combinations with, but they are strong enough to complement a player’s professional library, and can even have special combinations with other systems, providing players with more imaginative strategic options

      • Special colorless cards can be drawn randomly in battle to enrich the player’s deck, but they only have positive effects, enriching the player’s strategic options

5. Epilogue

At the time of the game’s release, the production team called Slay the Spire a Rougelite game, giving players a degree of certainty amidst the overall randomness, which is reinforced as players gain experience and eventually leads to a practically realistic strategy.

The Rogue element provides players with the thrill of a close win, and the strategic gameplay allows players to win without doubting that luck is their winning formula, proving the appeal that thinking brings to the game.

It’s hard to summarise what makes Slay the Spire work. The balance between random and strategic elements is just a symptom of what it is, but I think the core of it lies in the design philosophy of the team: Continuous optimisation of the game mechanics with the player experience at the core.

Killing Spire opened in Early Access in 2017 and won’t be released until 2019, during which time the team has been filling in content and adjusting values on a weekly basis, even though on the shop page they say “updated every fortnight”. I believe that listening to players and constantly optimising and improving the game experience is the distance between Killzone and a fun game.

Ring Fit Adventure

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

Ring Fit Adventure is a fitness RPG from Nintendo that requires the Nintendo Switch and Ring-Con to play.

Players take on the role of a warrior who uses fitness to fight against the Dragaux. Players need to perform actions that match their character’s movements to manipulate them to move, attack and other actions, combining gameplay with movement to create a gameplay experience that will keep players engrossed in fitness.

Ring Fit Adventure overcomes the weak feedback and monotony of the fitness process and creates a fun experience for the player with a complete gameplay framework for how fitness works.

2. Get immediate feedback on fitness

Work out first, Play later

Ring Fit Adventure is not the first physical fitness game to be released on the Switch platform, with Fitness boxing also utilizing the features of the Joy-con to create an exercise experience for the player.

These games are very pure and require the player to follow the character’s movements, but do not entice the player to stick with the game. The underlying logic of these games is the same as fitness, requiring players to have a strong self-drive to work out.

These products are more of an alternative to the game format for the gym-goer than a game.

And for most players, the main reasons for not being able to keep exercising are:

  • Monotonous and painful: the need to repeat the same movement over and over again, many times, makes it difficult to call the process fun.

  • Poor feedback: it often takes weeks or even months for the results to show up on the body.

Play first, work out later

Ring Fit Adventure goes in the opposite direction by first laying out the full RPG core mechanics in an interaction that requires the player to operate through movement.

The game’s own substantial RPG system features a much better numerical plan. Any action the player takes in the game converts into experience, and in the early stages of the game, the player can upgrade every 1-2 levels, and even towards the end of the game, up to 4 levels can be reached. The experience is enhanced by attack animations, background music and exercise assistance.

Using RPG elements, the game makes the sport more engaging.

  • Fun: each movement is animated with fun effects and there are hundreds of levels in 23 worlds for players to experience.

  • Strong Feedback: Every movement the player makes has a direct effect, including but not limited to moving, attacking, collecting, and recovering.

3. Core Mechanisms

Ring Fit Adventure takes a turn-based RPG approach to plot play and combat.

I have divided the core RPG system of this game into three sections: characters, levels and battles

3.1 Main Characters

  • Player Character

      • The character that players play as in the game does not have an official name. In Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, Nintendo named the figure Ring Fit Trainee.

      • This character opens the game by recklessly unlocking Drgaux’s seal at the beginning of the game.

  • NPC

      • Ring

          • Ring is the character that guides the player through the game, and it is also the Ring-con in the player’s hands.

          • Ring has five abilities to help players on their adventures.

Color Coding

Matching the attack with the enemy color makes said attack stronger

Smoothiecraft

Allows the player to make Smoothies

River Rowing

Allows the player to traverse long stretches of water

Jump Boost

Allows the player to flip during a jump by jumping twice in rapid succession

Wing Ability

Allows the player to cross any chasm

      • Honey and Hubby

          • Honey and Hubby are the couple who run the grocery shop in the game.

          • They will give out quests to players and sell props, equipment and materials.

  • Enemies

      • Dragaux

          • Dragaux is the game’s biggest villain, a fitness freak determined to beat the player.

          • Dragaux will appear repeatedly throughout the game, each time with a new method of attack.

      • The Four Masters

          • The four masters have been conquered by Dragaux and have blocked the player from challenging him on several occasions on his way to adventure.

Allegra

The Legs Master

Abdonis

The Abs Master

Armando

The Arms Master

Guru Andma

The Yoga Master

3.2 Level Exploration

  • The scenes in the game are divided into two categories: worlds and levels.

  • World

      • The player moves through the worlds by walking the grid

      • There are 23 worlds in the game for players to explore

      • Players can mix Smoothies in the world screen

      • The worlds contain the following

            • Towns, where players can buy items and take on side quests

            • Main levels, where players progress through the story

            • Branch levels, where players can choose to earn specific rewards or complete side quests

            • Arena levels, where players need to complete a series of battles in as few rounds as possible to earn rewards

            • Gym levels, where players need to complete a series of exercises and achieve the required moves to earn rewards

            • Challenge levels, where players need to play mini-games to meet scoring requirements to earn rewards

            • Bonus monsters, where the first time you reach a level you need to defeat bonus monsters that drop large amounts of gold or experience

            • Treasure chests, where players can earn rewards directly

            • Portal, which transports players to another location in the world to explore

  • Levels

      • Players need to keep moving through levels by running in place

      • Players move through levels by platform jumping

      • Challenge levels in which players will enter different level scenarios depending on the challenge objective

      • Levels contain the following

            • Players can collect gold coins and are rewarded with experience points for collecting three large gold coins

            • Enemies, where players can choose to fight or leap over them using a two-step jump

            • Mechanisms, which require the player to break in motion

            • Branching routes, with different rewards for different routes

            • Treasure chests, which players need to open with deep squats

3.3 Combat

  • Basic Attributes: The basic attributes of players and enemies are Blood, Attack and Defence.。

      • Character attributes change as you level up, unlock talent trees or equip clothes.

      • Enemy attributes will vary depending on the type of enemy.

      • Monsters without colour have slightly higher defence than other monsters

      • Darkened monsters have much higher defence than normal monsters

  • Skills：

      • Skills are how characters attack or recover in battle

      • Players can acquire new skills by unlocking talent trees or by opening treasure chests in levels

      • Players need to perform the movement represented by the skill to activate it, and the effect of the skill is positively related to the standard of the player’s movement

      • Although the number of movements required per attack or recovery varies by adjusting the intensity of the training, the upper limit of the value is fixed

      • There are 45 skills in 4 categories and each skill is divided into 4 levels, the higher the level, the better the effect

Arms(8)

Overhead Press / Front Press / Bow Pull / Overhead Arm Twist / Overhead Arm Spin / Shoulder Press / Tricep Kickback / Back Press

Stomach(16)

Knee-to-Chest / Standing Twist / Plank / Overhead Bend / Open & Close Leg Raise / Overhead Hip Shake / Seated Forward Press / Overhead Lunge Twist / Leg Raise / Flutter Kick / Pendulum Bend / Leg Scissors / Russian Twist / Overhead Side Bend / Seated Ring Raise

Legs(11)

Squat / Knee Lift / Thigh Press / Wide Squat / Hip Lift / Ring Raise Combo / Overhead Squat / Mountain Climber / Side Step / Knee-Lift Combo

Yoga(10)

Chair Pose / Warrior I Pose / Fan Pose / Warrior II Pose / Revolved Crescent Lunge Pose / Warrior III Pose / Hinge Pose / Tree Pose / Standing Forward Fold / Boat Pose

  • Enemy behaviour

      • Attack: All enemies can attack, attack power varies depending on type

      • Accumulate: Enemies will accumulate for one round before launching a powerful attack

      • Restore: yoga carpet enemies can restore their own blood and that of one other enemy

      • Summoning: pumped up bird enemies can summon other enemies to join the fight

      • Rest: all enemies may rest for a while without taking any action

  • Damage Formula
      • Normal Attack :(Player Attack + Cloth Attack + Action Attack) /Target Defense
      • Color Matched :All Attack * 150%
      • Smoothie :All attack * 120%(boost) or 135%(huge boost)

  • External systems

      • Special Attacks

          • By drinking Smoothies or unlocking a talent, the player has a chance to trigger a Rush attack

          • Rush attacks require the player to repeat as many moves as possible in a limited amount of time

          • Rush attacks have different levels of fixed damage (normal, good, perfect) depending on the number of moves the player makes

      • Props

          • Smoothies can be used to add bonuses in levels or to restore blood and provide buffs in battle

          • Players can synthesise Smoothies in the world interface or buy them in town

          • Players can obtain Smoothie recipes through treasure chests or level rewards

          • The ingredients needed to make Smoothies can be collected in the levels

          • Players will need to use Ring-Con with their moves to make Smoothie

      • Equipment

          • Equipment can improve character attributes or increase level rewards

          • Some equipment has special mechanics, such as translating the language of other races in the game

          • Equipment needs to be purchased by the player in town

      • Talent trees

          • Talent trees can unlock skills, improve character attributes and increase a character’s combat abilities

          • Players upgrade to gain skill points to unlock the talent tree

3.4 Summary

From a traditional RPG point of view, the system of Ring Fit Adventure is extremely simplified.

This gives us an insight into the design philosophy of the game: a low barrier to entry, but with the potential to investigate the core mechanics.

Ring Fit Adventure creates an accessible atmosphere that allows players with little exposure to RPGs to get started quickly, while providing a rich combat support system to improve the experience of skilled players.

The focus of the game’s design is still on the action experience of movement interaction, and the full RPG core is also intended for this experience. As a result, players will be driven by the RPG elements to keep playing and thus actively exercising for fitness purposes.

4. Enhancing the experience

Ring Fit Adventure ensures a fun fitness tone through its core mechanics, and reinforces this experience in the following ways.

  • Visuals

      • When the player performs a move correctly, the flame effects on the character’s head become brighter and the power-ups glow, creating the impression that the player is burning calories themselves.

      • When attacking, depending on the type of action, there are different attack effects around the enemy. These effects are closely related to the action, for example, when performing abdominal movements, the attack effect changes from a beer belly to a visible eight-pack.

      • When defending, the size of the defensive shield will change depending on the player’s level of force, the harder the player works, the larger the shield will be.

  • Sound effects

      • As the player moves through the level, a quick run in place will not only fire up the character’s head, but will also motivate the player with acceleration sounds.

      • As players perform actions, they are prompted by a low to rapid sound effect, the more standard the player’s actions, the faster and louder the sound translates.

  • Level design

      • Some levels will emphasise the repetition of a certain move, but will evolve through mechanics to present the same move as a different organ. For example, levels that emphasise deep squats will see the player face simple bouncing organs – springs that repeat deep squats – swings that deep squat in rhythm – and deep squat power cars.

      • On hard-to-pass sections, the game sets up large gold coin rewards ahead to motivate players to reach their goal in one fell swoop.

      • On difficult sections, the game will also zoom out to show the magnificent scenery ahead to entice players to go further.

  • Sports assistance

      • Players can choose their own exercise intensity to prevent them from giving up on the game because it is too difficult.

      • For players with special needs, the game offers a motion assist option to reduce the intensity of the motion in specific parts.

      • Each time you start the game, after 2-3 levels, you will be prompted not to over-exercise to reduce the chance of injury.

      • Customised stretching exercises at the end of each game, based on the movements performed that day.

5. Epilogue

In traditional RPGs, the plot is a very important part of the game. Ring Fit Adventure does not tell a complex story, but simply uses the story of Dragaux to set the stage for the entire system to be played by the player, and the game’s well-designed mechanics are all designed to create a fun fitness experience.

Nintendo immerses the player in the sport through an accessible and deep RPG system. I think this is not only an innovation in game design, but this game also serves to expand the community and reach of the game. While the player base is expanding, there are still prejudiced people who don’t understand the artistry and literature behind narrative games, and it’s games like Ring Fit Adventure that are most likely to become gamers.

With the addition of a rhythm mode in subsequent updates and a more difficult multi-week challenge once the game is cleared, Ring Fit Adventure is an excellent piece of work with solid roots and a high level of completion.

Death Stranding

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

Death Stranding is a third-person game created by Kojima Productions, which producer Hideo Kojima calls a Social bonding game.

The player plays as Sam, a courier belonging to the Bridge. After the outbreak of Death Stranding, the surface is no longer suitable for human survival, and only the unique courier can move safely outside. The player takes on this role, traveling west from the eastern United States, reconnecting the entire country to the Cairol network and confronting the enemies planning to cause the bio-extinction event along the way.

The game creates a unique connected experience by limiting player resource caps and asynchronous online play. This experience gives players the spiritual satisfaction of finding themselves ” being needed “.

2. Creating Small Impulses on Interest Curve

In most games, player emotion is directly related to the tension of the storyline and the rising difficulty of the combat. When plotted on a normal player experience curve, Death Stranding looks like this, with player emotions constantly changing as the storyline progresses.

But in Death Stranding, the asynchronous online system creates a unique connection experience for players, and the appreciation system creates another level of mood swings, even as players feel more pleasure from other players than the game itself.

In terms of the overall flow of the game.

In the first two chapters of the game, the game teaches the player a lot of unfamiliar concepts, while the player has very few resources, struggles to manage courses of action and has a very depressing atmosphere.

From the third chapter onwards, the player is given carriers and exoskeletons to aid in the action, while getting hold of more helpful buildings and props. At this point the player has more control over the delivery routes and can gain appreciation from other players through the buildings, allowing for more positive emotional feedback.

When building highways, the lack of supplies becomes apparent to the player, and incorrect route planning can put the player in a dilemma. The player’s emotions are rekindled when the online system secretly merges other players’ resources to aid in the construction of the highway and allows the player to lend a helping hand to other compatriots.

Once inside the snowy mountains, the player is unable to use vehicles to move around, returning to the way things were at the start of the game, although a more convenient zip line construction is soon unlocked and allows the player to go back over the snowy mountains to the previous area, creating a dramatic change of pace.

Towards the end of the game, the continuous large boss battles are outstandingly well executed, giving the player a new dimension.

This well-designed content aside, the players’ appreciation of each other forms a subtle fluctuation in the experience curve.

3. Innovative mechanisms

3.1 Resource management from A to B

Most traditional games are made in a format where the player accepts a mission at point A, travels to point B to complete it, and sets up points of interest in between.

Death Stranding, on the other hand, places the player’s experience on the journey from point A to point B. The core of the experience is how the player gets from A to B. To enhance this experience, the game creates a unique management system. To enhance this experience, the game has created a unique management system that is hidden within the courier system.

I have divided it into three categories.

  • Resource Management

      • Weight and centre of gravity：

          • Players can customise the placement of goods in transit, but their own load capacity is limited. The load can be enhanced with exoskeletons, but there are missions that require multiple packages, requiring the player to make trade-offs.

          • Players may encounter urgently needed supplies during transport and will not be able to carry them if there is insufficient load space.

          • The way goods are placed affects the character’s centre of gravity, and when the centre of gravity is shifted, the player needs to spend more effort on manoeuvres to keep the character balanced.

      • Shared space for equipment and goods

          • Players need ladders, climbing cables and other props to cross obstacles in the route, which share storage space and load with the cargo. The player needs to predict and allocate the number of props on the transport route.

          • There are combat scenarios where weapons also occupy storage space and players need to judge whether they need to carry weapons depending on their route.

      • Special mission requirements

          • Some tasks have additional requirements on the condition of the goods, for example: pizzas need to be stored flat and not submerged in water; valuable items can be damaged or even explode after repeated collisions, etc.

  • Route management

      • Potential enemies

          • There are two types of enemies in the game, BT and Mules, and the player needs to choose whether to move around them or not depending on the load.

          • There are differences in the weapons and equipment used against the two types of enemy, and players will need to allocate equipment for both sides.

      • Special weather

          • There is special weather in the game and the weather forecast is unlocked when the player arrives at the weather station, so the player needs to choose a transport route based on the weather.

          • Rainy weather can accelerate damage to goods and is often accompanied by BT.

      • Terrain

          • Up and downhill terrain can affect your ability to move, and you will need to have more props to keep you safe if there is a lot of this type of terrain on your route.

          • Rivers and mountains need to be crossed with props or buildings and players need to decide whether to carry construction resources depending on the situation.

      • Vehicles

          • There are two types of vehicles in the game: motorbikes and trucks. They have different carrying capacities, passing performance and range, so you will need to choose according to your objectives.

          • The game’s highways do not allow you to reach all target points, and goods stored on the vehicles may disappear due to the distance, so you cannot rely on them.

      • Buildings

          • Other players’ structures will appear in areas that are already connected to the network, and players can choose to carry resources to build structures on the routes they must take.

          • Routes built with structures such as bridges make it easier for players to drive their vehicles through.

  • Capability Management

      • Exoskeletons

          • There are three exoskeletons in the game, different exoskeletons are equipped for different situations and will directly affect the player’s ability to transport them.

      • Stamina

          • Stamina directly affects the player’s ability to move, with a lower stamina limit making it difficult to carry cargo across terrain such as rivers.

          • Player stamina is directly related to stamina and affects how dangerous a player is in the event of an encounter.

          • Stamina can be restored by building or drinking water and is directly related to the player’s route planning.

3.2 Asynchronous online

Death Stranding uses asynchronous online functionality, where players will play the game solo, but other players’ banners, buildings, and supplies will appear in the game world, and players can praise each other.

Compared to Dark Souls’ admonition system, Death Stranding also goes a step further in the following areas.

  • The creation of roads

      • The game counts the routes taken by players around the world, and when players frequently choose the same route, the vegetation on that route disappears, exposing the ground and creating the feeling of a real route.

      • This detail not only shows how the world has changed but also helps later new players to quickly discover common routes.

      • On the other hand, this mechanic demonstrates how a human society full of rules can be created from nothing.

  • Much visible Likes

      • Signs, buildings and props placed by players may be displayed simultaneously in other players’ worlds and all may receive likes.

      • When a player logs into the game for the first time each day, the game will alert them to how many likes they have received. Players will also receive such notifications periodically during continuous play.

      • There is an ability in the character level that is directly linked to the number of likes. The likes that players give to each other can feed directly into the game’s gains and losses.

  • SOS system

      • Players can post online requests for resources when they are in trouble.

      • When other players receive the request, they can choose to transport supplies to the nearest resource storage point.

      • This mutual help is entirely voluntary on the part of the players. The social experience created by players actively choosing to offer help is far stronger than forced co-operative tasks.

4. Enhancing the experience

Death Stranding creates a uniquely connected experience through mechanics that are enhanced by scenario design and mission design.

  • Scenario design

      • As a semi-open world game, the game uses multiple triangular-shaped terrains to shade each other and create visual gravity to motivate players to explore.

      • Although the game is open, there is little visible vegetation. The ground is covered in short moss-like plants, creating open vistas and making player buildings and signs more visible.

      • The moss-like plant-covered ground allows the player to visualize the real terrain and gives the player clearer information for route planning.

      • The game’s highways do not connect all mission points, requiring the player to explore the route on foot with a lighter load at the end of the road.

  • Mission design

      • Players intercepting missions that require them to cross large distances in-game will be able to easily spot carriers near the mission acceptance point. These carriers may belong to other players or NPCs, encouraging players to make connections by actively displaying shared content.

      • During some missions, players will receive likes from NPCs. The humorous and natural way in which the NPCs give compliments in the storyline shows this slightly abrupt in-game setting in a natural way, reinforcing the player’s acceptance of this mechanic.

      • In the main combat missions, players are often not adequately resupplied for battle. When the player is in danger, characters with the names of other players appear in the battle scenes to provide resources to the player. The game internally increases the amount of exposure players have to each other, reinforcing the connection between players.

5. Epilogue

Death Stranding is a game that focuses on the player experience, which is a far cry from the many games that sell well but don’t really innovate. But at the same time, it has always been a game that has received polarising reviews. In my opinion, there are three main reasons for this situation.

  1. Slow pacing in the early stages: Within a month of the game’s release, 75% of people had made it through Chapter 2, but only 25% had completed Chapter 3. The game throws a lot of obscure settings at the player early on, while the player’s abilities are not improved for a long time, making it easy to get confused and uninteresting.

  2. Low Combat Difficulty: While the focus of the game is not on combat, the low difficulty of the combat section detracts from the player’s sense of immersion in the plot. Even towards the end of the game, the monsters the player encounters are visually overwhelming, but the desire to attack is minimal.

  3. Poor Streaming Experience: Many players first learned about the game through the live stream, but the complex mechanics made it difficult for viewers to get a sense of the fun. When this group of players share their opinions online, it can create conflict with those who have played the game.

With the launch of Death Stranding: Director’s Cut, turret buildings that can be acquired in the early-mid stages have been added, as well as new combat styles and weapons that improve the player’s experience in the early stages and new sneak levels that add to the richness of the game.

It currently has a 53% trophy capture rate for Chapter 3 on the Playstation and a 49% trophy capture rate for the final pass, a stark contrast from the beginning of the release in the test of time.

Dice Adventure

Genre：

Adventure with Rouge element

Tools:

Photoshop & Draw.io

Platform:

Board Game

Team:

Ziwei Niu – Independent

Overview

Dice Adventure is a tabletop game with Rouge elements that can be played by 1-2 players.

The game can be played with just paper and dice. Players use random numbers from dice rolls to set up scenarios on a 13*13 map, defeating monsters to strengthen their character’s abilities and then using those abilities to escape from randomly generated battlefield situations.

The game currently features 3 characters, 2 sets of monster combinations and 6 random events.

Why I Made This Game

I have hosted many board game parties among my classmates and experienced many PVE-based board games such as Cthulhu: Death May Die and One Deck Dungeon.

They are fun, but still have these problems.

1. the need for multiple participants, but the difficulty of rejoining the game after one party has failed to play

2. the game sets are overloaded with grooming content and are not easily portable

3. the rules are too complex and can easily detract from the atmosphere if some time is spent explaining the rules before playing

4. the scripts are fixed and have little replay value and the flow is too similar each time

5. random events are poorly anticipated and appear after the player’s actions, making it too frustrating when the player is going through a normal turn only to have the game end abruptly due to a random event.

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To this effect, I have analysed and studied two excellent strategy games with Rouge elements, Into the Breach and Slay the Spire, and absorbed the best parts of them to combine with tabletop games.

1. Simplifying the calculations in the rules so that players can get started quickly and with relatively lenient number requirements.

2. The ability to play with the most basic props, making it easy to have a round anytime, anywhere.

3. The use of dice to incorporate a random element that makes the experience different each time the game is played.

4. The random events are judged before the player’s actions, and the random events are specific to the scenario and the situation and do not directly affect the player’s character.

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Gameplay

Dice Adventure can be played with just a sheet of paper and two dice, and players will keep breaking through a 13*13 Grid map.

The game flow is shown in the diagram:

Test and Iteration

Step 1 Prototype

The idea originally came from CALART’s Coursea online course, where one of the assignments was to design a game using a piece of paper and two dice.

Step 2 Feedback

After submitting this assignment, I received feedback from others who liked the idea of laying out the game scenes through dice, so I started to revise and test this section.

Step 3 Expedition

After expanding the map from 6*6 to 13*13, the original story background and character assignments made the whole scene seem empty, so I started trying to add more monsters and characters to try to play with two people.

Step 4 Optimisation

Optimized the numerical planning of the entire game, conceived several options for the numerical growth of players and monsters, and finally chose a point scheme that allows players to choose the timing of their upgrades.

Step 5 Game Manual

Adding art resources to make the whole game look more accessible and optimising the presentation of the rules to bring together all the parts the player has to know on a single sheet of paper .

Future Plan

The game is now fully playable and the feedback is fair, but this is still far from what I was aiming for. Therefore, I will continue to optimize Dice Adventure in the future.

I think there are still significant problems with the game in the following areas.

1. Lack of compelling backstory and visual performance:

The parts of the game that are currently undergoing a lot of iterative updates are the aspects of the map, mechanics, numerical values, etc. that are closely related to gameplay, and the game is very weak on storyline. As a result, the monster modules and player characters are somewhat oddly matched and do not provide the best immersive experience.

In the future I will be redesigning the game’s worldview, writing the backstory and setting more attractive goals for the player, as well as unifying the characters, monsters and scenery to create a more immersive world. Perhaps there will also be props and equipment added, depending on whether I can find a randomised mode more suited to board games in the future.

2. The rules are still not simplified enough:

While Dice Adventure’s rules are already of the accessible variety compared to traditional PVE board games, the arrangement of characters and monsters still requires a lot of memorisation, which obviously runs counter to the extremely simple requirements for props.

I’m still conceptualising ways to continue to simplify the flow of the game, and I think the most complicated section at the moment lies in the part where random elements are generated using dice, which could be solved by trying to use the DND dice or playing poker cards, or possibly by re-planning the map to reduce the number of dice thrown in the layout session.

3. The number of monster modules is still limited:

Dice allow for random location generation of monsters, but not random monster types, which results in repeat playability remaining limited. The way to increase the variety of monsters in the current format is to keep expanding the number of modules, however this is not a sustainable solution.

I think that eventually the monster sets will be consolidated into a monster catalogue, or just provide standard values with other trait alienation calculations, which can be customized by the player, and presented to the player with a more inclusive worldview background .

Repair Below From Above

Genre：

VR Puzzle

Tools:

Unreal Engine5 & Blender & PS

Platform:

Oculus Mobile

Team:

Ziwei Niu – Program

Qiantao Zhang – Program

Min Pan – Art

Ziyi Hua – Art

Enwei Jin – Art

 

Overview

Repair Below From Above is a VR game where players have to complete puzzles in a closed box based on information from the monitor above.

The game is the work of a few friends and I for Epic Games MegaJam 2022, the theme of the GameJam is “As Above So Below”.

I was responsible for concept design, programming, sound, animation, visual effects , testing, and optimisation for this project. This was also my first time working on a VR game in Unreal Engine5.

Gameplay Flow

Click to Download

Brainstorming

After knowing that the theme of the activity was ‘As Above So Below’, we conceived the idea in terms of both the literal meaning and the meaning of the phrase.

Literal meaning:

A game with mechanisms linking two different dimensions such as up and down, positive and negative, inside and outside. 

Meaning of the Phrase:

The phrase is derived from the Jade Book.

In the Isaac Newton version, the phrases appear written like: “that which is below is like that which is above and that which is above is like that which is below”.

A double sided Pool idea
An upside down idea
An up and down idea
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In the end we opted for a top-down concept that was more in tune with the theme and refined it into a more logical magnetic mechanism.

Gameplay

In Repair Below From Above, players need to pick up the magnetic spanner and place the magnetic ball into the level box, changing the position of the spanner according to the information on the display above to attract the ball through the maze and reach the target location.

The magnetic spanner has a power limit and is fully charged at the start of the level. Each time the magnetic force is activated, the power will be consumed and the level will fail if the power is depleted but the target is not reached.

The magnetic ball has inertia and will continue to move in the direction of the magnetic force when attracted by the spanner until it hits an obstacle.

Gameplay Flow Chart

There are 3 levels in the game and after completing each level, the ball is transported to its initial position and the level container is changed.

The three levels are structured as follows:

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Development Process

After deciding on the content of the game, I first built the game environment on top of VRTemplate and configured the player character VRPawn for subsequent testing.

I then started to create the character’s hand animations. There are six hand movements depending on the player’s buttons and the type of object they are holding.

Once the spanner was finished, I animated the grip position to ensure that the player could keep the correct orientation when picking up the handle with either hand.

While the rest of the team worked on the models and functions, I collected some of the game’s sound effects and background music and added additional effects through Audition to match the style of the game.

In the engine, I used both Cue and Metasounds to add sound effects to the game.

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Once the scenes and features were mostly complete, I used both the traditional Particle System and Niagara to create the rolling effects for the magnetic ball and the electromagnetic effects for the magnetic spanner, which vibrate when the player activates the magnetic effects.

In the end I was responsible for packaging the whole game into Oculus Mobile format.

Final Built

Future Plan

This six and a half day production cycle included a lot of firsts for me:

My first GameJam; My first VR game in Unreal; and My first Visual Effects.

Our project has been submitted to MegaJam 2022, but in the final test I think there is still a lot of room for improvement in the game.

1. Lack of depth in mechanics

The game tends to have a good amount of mechanics, but the number of levels is short and the levels are of a single composition.

The game experience is poor if the playthrough is short, but the existing mechanics are too easy if there is an opportunity to make more levels. The biggest challenge of the game is the control of the direction of magnetic suction of the ball and the power consumption of the spanner.

There is still a lot of room to explore the mechanism of magnetism itself, such as using magnetism to push the ball, strong magnetism to control the ball to jump, and speeding up the ball to hit the scene that can destroy it.

2. The visual effects are just normal

The trailing path of the ball using the traditional particle effects is fair, but the spanner electromagnetic effects are a bit abrupt and large due to my first experience with Niagara, which may affect the player’s normal gameplay.

I will continue to learn about effects in the future. Ideally, the electromagnetic effect should be located between the two sides of the spanner, with the light effect slightly larger than the size of the top of the spanner.

3. Inadequate testing

The time taken to understand the theme, define the concept of the game and create a program that could be run for testing was too long, ending up with only two and a half days for us to make further changes to the mechanics.

This also resulted in the levels and mechanics being presented to the player in a more rushed experience at the end. We wanted to be able to build the test content as quickly as possible once the base gameplay was finalised, shortening the test time so that we had more time to optimise the gameplay and graphics.

Mon-ssenger

Genre:

Online 3D Simulation Game

Tools:

Unity & Blender & PS & Procreate

Platform:

iOS/Andriod

Team:

Ziwei Niu – Independent

Game Overview

Mon-ssenger is a simulation game combined with social element. In the game, players will raise their monsters to explore their world and meet other players. Monsters in game need to be nurtured are the same as pets in reality and they will act according to their status. As players nursing, they will grow up thus unlock more activities and areas.

Story Background

Mon-ssenger Inc. created a parallel world called The Monster Dimension. Little monsters there, as natives, build a world has siliar latout of reality. They love to travel, communicate and live at ease in a carefree world. However, people in our world are suffering from tight pace of life. Numerous anxieties and fears tear people apart from each other but there is still hope.

As the bridge between 2 worlds, Mon-ssager Inc. opened ports on people’s mobile devices, gave people a chance to raise newborn monsters. They will use their own growth and experiences to help people fix connections with each other.

Why I Made This Game

I chose this background story because soical pressures has caused many people to suffer from social anxiety. They are thought to have Social Phobia. I even found that lots of friends around me are in this situation to a greater of lesser extent.

Therefore I surveyed nearly 100 respondents to discover the real source of their anxiety and found that they were actually worried about the comments came with social behaviour, especially from strangers. Below are some of the experiences shared by interviewees.

Moreover, almost all of them had actively tried to get rid of this problem, but very few had suceeded. On the other hand, they all agreed that appropriate social activities could alleviate the symptoms of social phobia.

“I don’t dare to say hello, I’m often embarrassed, I’m embarrassed for myself and for others, I’m not used to asking for help, I don’t dare to talk too much, all these things make it hard for me, but I still find it hard to overcome.”

——24, Designer, Beijing

” Going to class makes me anxious compared to online classes.”

——20, Student, New York

” It’s really uncomfortable to say hello to a familiar stranger, I don’t even know what his name is.”

——23, Illustrator, London

” Not being able to say what I really want to say, or being afraid to take the relationship further, still bothers me.”

——18, Student, Beijing

Case Study

I have analyzed 7 products in 2 categories, each of them has its own characteristics, but for the social phobia group, problems still exist.

And here are solutions in my game:

• The first one players will meet is his/her cute monster. They build relationships with monsters before meeting strange players in the game.

• Message is a core mechanism which means players can share events happened in game easily.

• Mailing behaviour is planned and encouraged with the aim of sharing and mutual support, allowing players to cultivate a social network for their monsters and creating an environment where players can communicate with each other with reasonable restrictions.

• In the end, nursing their monsters is the biggest incentive to get them back in the game.

Gameplay

Players can name, choose personalities and customise the appearance of their little monsters. As the little monster grows, it will gain more appearance customisation points and the range of its outings will improve, the random events it encounters will change, and it will develop its own preferences for things.

Monsters are at the heart of Mon-ssenger, players explore, understand and observe the world in the game through monsters, and as monsters are the only characters that players interact with directly in the game, it is important to ensure the integrity of the image of the little monsters in the first place.

Monsters Design

There are 8 personalities for monsters, which players have to choose at the bagining of the game. The personalities affect the behavioural tendencies of monsters after hanging game.

Monsters have 4 attributes and each of them affect the behaviour of monsters. Players can raise relevant attributes through postive activities while they may decrease due to some random events.

The monsters have 4 different actions that players can see the current actions of monsters via ICONs on status bar.

Players have 5 ways of interacting with monsters, all of which can be done by tapping and dragging, causing the monsters’ attributes and actions to change.

Messages

Other mechanisms

Players will find different ornamental plants, random events and quests in different seasons of the game, and the scenes in the small courtyard will change in appearance with the seasons.

In addition, players can observe monsters trigger different random events at different stages of growth, seasons and moods. Random events may bring new souvenirs, affect the properties of monsters, and meet other players’ monsters. Players will find an alert window for random events when they open the game and will need to make a choice. Some of the random events will have a series of follow-up events that tell the player about interesting incidents in the game.

Processing

Mindmap Prototype

Modeling

Monster Baby Stage Model

In Mon-ssenger, the furry little monsters are the main characters that accompany the players. Players can customize the appearance of the little monsters, with different optional features at different stages of growth.

In addition to the physical features of the monster, players can also choose to dress the monster in clothing and accessories that are regularly changed in the shop (in progress).

furry test
furry test
The Original All-in-one Test
The Original All-in-one Test

Initially, I tried to blend several scenes together, but this resulted in the camera not being able to find the right movement to switch scenes, for example, some of the hidden light sources for indoor effects would appear in the courtyard scenes. So I cut the four scenes apart. This way I can also place better plants in the courtyard scenes.

UI/UX Design

Player Experiences Flow Chart
Player Experiences Flow Chart

In Mon-ssenger, the player does not need to spend a lot of time completing various tasks, so I wanted to present the player directly with the most suitable interface for observing the status of the little monsters.

The shop and the postal service act as two separate screens where the player can directly discover the desired functionality. The status of the little monster will always be displayed on the top left of the screen, so that the player can keep an eye on its status in any situation. Similarly, settings can be opened in each screen.

Mon-ssenger is a game designed for mobile devices and all interface proportions are based on the screen of the iPhone X.