Over time, during this semester, I have come to enjoy Unity a lot more than I had expected. The idea of making 3D games and models to tell stories intrigues me. As a public relations professional, I believe Unity has a lot of potential to be tool for creating tactics that can be included in PR campaigns for brands. As a result, I chose to create my final assignment in Unity.

I chose my second pitch that I had given in the class a few weeks ago. This idea was on using photogrammetry to show yoga poses and tell a story. I decided to take it one level up by adding a story where the first person is searching for this all-powerful being who lives in solitude in the Himalayas. None can reach this being on foot, one has to go through a magical portal to teleport to the being.

As a result, our protagonist sets out in the forest of the Himalayas where she/he meets various characters on the way. These beings are supernatural themselves and have attained enlightenment through their penance. These characters guide the protagonist to the portal.

To make this possible, I took my time to create a mystical land and added elements such as skybox, mountains, trees and textures that complement the theme. I also created characters in Mixamo and added animations to make the interaction with these characters look real. I downloaded characters from the asset store and added animation to them and even used the Trnio app to recreate 3D model of my friend that I placed in the terrain.

Finally, I took help of a few more friends to add record narrations that I wrote for each character, Narrations that added to the mysterious aspect of the game. I recorded my own voice for the final character and added a voice modulation to the same for a dramatic effect. To make the game more interactive, I added box colliders to each character that on trigger commanded the characters to start talking. I did this by creating a logic in Playmaker.

One challenge that gave me the opportunity to learn something new on my own was to add a teleportation effect that was different from what professor Pacheco taught us in class. This method of teleportation is much cleaner as doesn't rely on the Itween move to action, but simply transports the character to another location instantly. This teleportation method is made possible using the set position function. To create this effect I took inspiration from the following URL:

Another new thing that I learnt was to add water that 3D looking rather than a texture. I did this by self-exploring the default assets that we import into unity. However, to add depth to water, I had to first lift the whole terrain to a considerable height and then level it at places where I wanted to create water bodies. This gave the illusion that there is a depth to water. This was a little time consuming and I had to to use hit and trial method when deciding the dimensions of the water body.

Additionally, I tried to add voice to my screen recording using Quicktime, however was unsuccessful as the voice created from the computer clashes with the microphone input and creates an annoying echo in the video.

Though I would have had fun creating a VR video as well, this project was a lot more fun and was easier in terms on working on it as per my availability. For a VR video, I would have had to coordinate with different people to be present at a particular location at the same time. This could have been challenging, especially during the later half of the semester when all students have their respective projects to work on.