Production Time: 5 months
Project Year: 2018
Software: Unity
Role: Scripter, Game Designer, and Project Manager
Team: 1 designer, 2 Artists
Watergy is a mobile VR gamification app made for Hunderfossen Energisenter, an hands-on experiential education park in Innlandet Norway. The goal of the app is to provide a short, engaging and educational experience about hydropower for of ages 6-12.
My key tasks were developing a handsfree interaction method, overall game design, and managing task assignments, and product owner communications. Using VR Toolkit I made a custom VR movement functionality, and look-and-wait interaction.
Look'n Use Interaction
Look'n Shout Interaction
Hunderfossen Energisenter (Hunderfossen Center for Energy) regularly received school classes between ages 6-12 as part of their mission statement to educate kids about electricity and in particular hydroelectric energy. As part of this they wanted a take-home mobile VR experience to reinforce lessons learnt at the center.
I identified 3 key aspects to make the concept work:
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The application needed to easily accessible.
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The experience needed to rely on simple, intuitive mechanics.
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Key educational points had to be high level and and easy to remember.
To inform our decisions on genre, what hardware to target, and audience usage preferences we were allowed to survey a sample of visitors. Some of our key findings were that the audience majority (53%) used iPhones spanning up to 4 years in age (2013) and 41% used Androids up to 6 years old (2011). Secondly 73% played games on their phone in the span of a month, mostly sports and shooter games, with minimal experience with VR games (7%).
In summary, the app needed to be small and lightweight, and the gameplay easily teachable and intuitive, while still utilizing VR.
Researching mobile shooter games at the time, a key mechanic was that where the player character looks, determines the interaction that happens. Forward movement and being determined by view angle from the ground and center. Actions like crouching happening if the character is looking straight down. In Watergy, being VR, with unrestricted control of the character view, we adapted this into a "Look'n X" principle. If the user desires to do an action, they have to look at the target object for a set time, to enable interaction, then perform the action.
The rationale behind the principle is that looking around naturally happens in VR, and pausing naturally happens if something happens when you look at an object. In Watergy, a progress bar appears when you look at an interactable object, grabbing attention, and after the object is triggered, an action prompt happens.
Unlike mobile shooters, to limit both scope and complexity of gameplay, the character is stationary, with teleportation abilities to move between locations. This could be performed by looking at a teleporter object for a set time.
The primary mode of interaction in the app is a "Look'n Lift" interaction where the user can look at something, which will then follow their viewport until used. To add variation and interest to this there is also the "Look'n Shout" mechanic, where once an object is enabled for interaction, the user can "shout" into their phone's microphone to create enough Decibel to trigger a mechanic. This is primarily used to interact with physics and animations.
