Vikranth: A Mixed Reality Gaming Experience
Team Members: Seven
My Role: XR Designer and Developer
Duration: One Week
Imagine your whole room turns into a battlefield, and you are the protagonist of this story. Your goal? Find and shoot enemies while dodging bullets and dangers. Vikranth is a mixed reality game that blends the real world with the virtual world, offering an immersive gaming experience.
BRIEF OVERVIEW
The brief was pretty straightforward: create an experience for children and adults that would generate some nostalgia among them while experiencing it. The experience needed to be a mixed reality experience and should be immersive and engaging.
INITIAL IDEATION
Since it was supposed to be a Mixed Reality Experience, we wanted to take advantage of our lab space and its surroundings 😅. After a lot of ideation, we came up with the idea of a game where the player would be in a battlefield and would have to find and shoot enemies while dodging bullets and enem.
Storyboarding
Based on our previous ideation, we created a storyboard that would help us visualize the game and its mechanics. The storyboard helped us to understand the flow of the game and the interactions that would be required to make the game engaging.
Key Highlights
Immersive Gameplay -- Intuitive Interactions -- Spatial Audio -- Haptic and Audio Feedback -- First Person View
DESIGN SPRINT
We ran a series of design sprints, each focusing on a different aspect of the game. We also used the design sprints to test the game with potential users and gather feedback.
Unexpected Outcome: Initially, it was supposed to be a mixed reality experience, but to make it more immersive, we went ahead with creating a virtual reality experience along with it!
Reason: Mixed Reality Experience lacked the necessary immersion we were looking for.
GAME GENRE: STRATEGY, ADVENTURE, FPS
AGE GROUP: 13+
Core Loops
The player starts with scanning the environment for the playable area. Once the game starts, the player will first play the Virtual Reality part of the game, where they will be introduced to the game and prologue. Once the player is comfortable with the game, they will be introduced to the Mixed Reality part of the game.
game flow
scenes
Virtual Reality
- Onboarding in Virtual Reality Environment
- Game starts with a brief introduction
- Player gets to know the objective
Mixed Reality
- Main game starts
GAMEPLAY IN MIXED REALITY
- Collect the gun
- Find the enemy in your surroundings
- Shoot, dodge enemies, and score points to progress to the next level.
USER TESTING AND INSIGHTS
First Prototype Implementation:
- Implemented basic gameplay elements:
- Implemented grabbing functionality.
- Spawn enemies within the environment.
- Establish kill zones with necessary colliders.
- Integrate scoring system and timer.
- Develop a game controller with three states. (Start, Waiting and Over)
- Players found the game engaging and immersive.
- Some of the players enjoyed the spatial audio and haptic feedback.
- Some of them found the UI screens difficult to interact with.
- A few were unable to pick up the gun.
KEY INSIGHTS
Based on the feedback, we decided to improve the game further and add more features to enhance the gameplay experience.
- The gun interactions were made easier to control and interact with.
- Implement haptic feedback for enhanced user experience.
- Improve movement and direction of the enemies for a more realistic behavior.
- Utilize Scoreboard on the gun to view scoreboard in a natural way.
- Enhance lighting within the environment.
- Adding spatial UI for better accessibility.
Second Prototype Implementation:
Iterative Testing and Refinement:
We conducted more user testing to gather feedback and improve the game with the time we had!.
What's next?
- Ideally, we want to Introduce multiplayer features for shared exploration experiences.
- We are looking at implementing a wider range of weapons and power-ups for more engaging gameplay.
- Enhancing the environment with more interactive elements and obstacles.
PROCESS PICTURES
Gameplay video
FULL CASE STUDY
If you want to know more about the project with all the design process involved, please click below:
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