Our Process Creating

Secrets of a Lost World

First Steps

When our group first got together, we set out to create a first-person walking simulator set in a virtual museum to tell the stories of different sustainable and unsustainable past and future. Initially, we wanted to address topics that covered climate change and sustainability in the traditional sense. As we started contemplating where we could take this project, we decided to head in a direction in which the player takes the role of an outside species experiencing the trials and tribulations of a long-gone civilization through their last remaining historical record.

Aligning Our Vision

The topic and project idea was very broad and so we needed to make sure everyone was on the same page. During our first brainstorming session, everyone was super excited and was shooting out as many ideas as possible. So to get everyone on the same page we created mood boards to showcase our individual visions for this project. This exercise was super helpful because once we all had this on paper we were able to identify the width of our scope and start narrowing our focus.

Narrative

The narrative was one of the more difficult things to get settled on. Near the beginning of the project, we had a really solid idea of what we wanted to end up with, but for a while, we kept getting bogged down with specifics. But after conjuring up a kind of ‘timeline’ as shown above it was much easier to focus more on content than context. We realized that the player doesn’t need to know everything to have all the information they need to play the game, so once we moved past that roadblock we were able to get into the nitty-gritty of level and game design.

Exhibit Planning

After deciding on the direction we wanted to take the museum, we created a system of populating the exhibit spaces in a collaborative whiteboard environment called Miro. The system was we would go room by room and do a five-minute silent brainstorm, then we would each individually present our ideas. Afterward, we'd categorize the ideas based on how relevant they were to the exhibition room. From there we would identify themes and narrow our focus on the individual aspects we wanted to cover in each exhibit. The images above and below show a before and after of this process.

While we were figuring out what was going into our space, our dev team began the process of laying down the foundation of our museum. We took this initial layout and overlaid the narrative cards from the twine map to get a better sense of the player's path throughout the museum. Once we laid out the player's path we decided we need to streamline the museum's layout so that it was easier to follow.

This is the final layout of the museum that would go into the final build of the game. Once we had a more linear path and layout we were able to shift our focus to populating the exhibits, designing gameplay, and fleshing out the narrative.

We took the narrowed focus we gained from the brainstorming sessions and started crafting our player experience by creating “paper prototypes” in Miro. We made objectives for each room and designed our gameplay around them. We used sticky notes and icons to emulate tokens on a board game and walked through the player experience to get a better idea of what the game felt like.

Asset Creation

When creating the assets, we tried to focus on crafting objects that would be unique to our game. Above is an example of the inspiration photos we had for a few of our assets. After gathering a few concept photos, we passed off the ideas to our Art Lead, Sarah, and she built them in Maya and used Substance Painter and Photoshop to texture them.

Unity Development

When creating the scenes in Unity, we went based on sketches as shown above in other aspects of our game. We also discussed how the Unity scenes were looking after almost every new addition to see if the team liked what was done. These are some sketches.

Final Build