ANTHUS PC — Week 10— Term 3

The final week, predictably enough, involved ironing out the last remaining bugs before submission. For example, in trying to make scene 1 look more aesthetically pleasing (matching fog colour to skybox lighting, tweaking the materials of the landscape, floor tiles and statue so that it looked more blended) I ended up accidentally causing an issue with the Zeus statue. It seemed to be being eaten by moths! Random patches across the face, chest and shoulders were missing. The solution turned out to be simply to push the metallic slider on the texture up to max. A simple solution that was the 50th thing we tried so it took forever to fix.

Zeus lurking beneath Mount Olympus in Scene 1

I noticed that the frame rate dropped down to <100 in scene 2, which was due to the pressure on the graphics card induced by the presence of 10 different big mirrors. The solution was to make the first three mirrors active at the start of the scene and then switch these off and the other seven on when they moved into the third and final bird experience.

I also had to switch over all the narrator clips from my voice to that of my voice actor friend. Once these were in the experience I realised that I needed to get him to do some of them again. This is because while they sounded fine when listened to in isolation, it didn’t always work in succession as the story unfolded.

Scene 2 overview: players always start as the sparrow. Afterwards, if they choose the left corridor they turn into a crow and from there, become a seagull if they go left or an eagle if they go right. If, after being a sparrow, they took the first right they would become a duck and thereafter going left turns them into an owl and right to become a pigeon. At the end, having admired their appearance in a mirror as 3 of 7 possible birds, they choose which they will permanently become by walking through one of three final mirrors.

The last of these narrative passages in scene 2 tells the player to walk through the appropriate mirror: left mirror to continue as the first bird (the sparrow) middle mirror to continue as the second bird (either the crow or the duck) and the right mirror to continue as the third bird (either the gull, the eagle, the owl or the pigeon). This required setting up three different trigger boxes and re-writing of the script that closes doors (to present re-entry to previous corridors) so that it would remove any birds stood at the foot of each mirror at the final decision point so that only the birds encountered were featured i.e. if the last bird experienced was the eagle, then the owl, pigeon and gull are rendered invisible.

I also needed to nail down the AR component of scene 3, which includes 5 different QR codes scattered around the forest, each result in the superimposition of a 3D animation of one of the birds with a Zeus narrative description of a fascinating bonus fact about that bird. The final solution (so to speak) was to buy a webcam for my PC to test the android build and then send it to Alex to double check it also works on his Android smartphone.

In this part of Scene 3 the player has encountered a fallen berry and a QR code. NB when berry counter at the top reaches 12 the message changes to “You win! Please hit space bar to exit..”

The final mission was to add some berries to the trees that would periodically drop so that they could be collected by the player (simply by running around, flying comes in a later build). Each tree simultaneously drops all their huge oversized pink berries which then roll around on the ultra-smooth floor until they reach equilibrium, which was very useful for catching the player’s eye.

Here’s the most recent play through video…