Team Tuniverse Final Project Proposal

Members: Katie Kreider, Mark Banzhoff, Max Vecchitto

For the final project in Immersive Design, Team Tuniverse (Max, Katie and Mark) is setting out to build a game demo to accompany our Re Studio project. The game demo will include a space environment with planets, space stations, and asteroids and it will include a spaceship with flying mechanics.

We would like to see if we can get the flight mechanics to work in VR as well, so we can have users play on the HTC Vive at the studio for our final presentation on April 26th. We will need to do further research to see how the VR aspect might work.

The ultimate goal of this project is to build a game demo that is fun and compelling for the user to engage with. The game demo itself will be built in Unity and we will also make accompanying assets such as animated logos in Illustrator and Cinema 4D. We may also incorporate Figma as a tool to produce various UX elements. The Tuniverse game demo will allow us to user test our idea and see what is working and not working and where we can improve the experience.

We want to give users a completely new way to experience and discover music and to do that we need to start by getting the basics of gameplay to work well enough that it is an enjoyable experience for the user. The game demo will work by using the Unity script functions to fly at first with a keyboard and mouse and once we get that to work properly we will attempt to add VR capabilities.

We anticipate quite a few challenges, first with getting the game mechanics to work properly and get animations to sync up with the inputs from the user. As a component of the Re Studio project the Tuniverse game demo will serve as a core component of that project. We will also use many aspects that we have previously learned in CM Studio such as Cinema 4D, Unity, and others. The components we are setting out to design are the game demo itself, branding, interfaces, loading screens, menu design, etc.

We want to achieve a fairly high fidelity end product similar to the worlds we built for our week 7 projects. We would like a fidelity that is comparable to other modern video games of this type. We will be using the windows laptops as well as the HTC Vive rigs at the studio in addition to our own computers.

We have started to build a crude spaceship and space environment in Unity to see if this would even be possible and even though we have an early demo the game is quite promising. We plan to meet weekly as a group to check in on our progress and to be a resource to one another. We are still negotiating the learning curve in unity as well as Cinema. We anticipate needing help with getting the game mechanics to work properly both for keyboard controls as well as VR controls. We don’t fully understand how flying a ship in VR would be best built so some trial and error is expected.