Celestial
About
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Role:
Programmer/Designer
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Platform:
Oculus Quest 2
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Tool:
Unity 3D
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Description:
Celestial is a warm and cozy world that allows players to relax and mess around in it. The player will act as a powerful celestial traveler who travels to this colorless island belongs to a princess who asks for a favor: color the island using the colorful stars that fall from the sky.
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Duration:
2 weeks
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Assigned Theme:
Naive guest & inlusion of freedom
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Contribution:
1. Themed our game to be a warm puzzle game taking place on an island.
2. Designed the mechanism of coloring objects by throwing stars.
3. Implemented all the VFX in our game including star shatter effect, fire shader, ocean shader and the glowing star shader.
4. Scripted the logic of floating trunks, flying birds and how the stars transfer their materials to the objects they hit.
The theme of this round's project
Like there's a given theme for every game jam, every round in our BVW courses is themed. The theme of this round is "a game for naive guest." So there will be guests who do not have abundant experiences in VR playing our game. We cannot give them instructions, but we have to predict three things they will do in our game. It appears to be players exploring our world freely, but whatever they do is within our calculation. That's why it's called the illusion of freedom.
Manipulating guests' behavior
We did a lot of things to manipulate guests' behavior. In the beginning, everything is grayscaled. We deliberately let several stars fall on the ground and colorize the floor in front of our guests to let them acknowledge that the colorful star transfers its color to things that it hit on. To reinforce this process, we let several stars shatter on the ground, changing the color of the land before we lock down the availability of ground color changing so that the stars can accumulate on it.
Manipulating guests' behavior
Even though our game doesn't have a clear objective that tells our guests what kinds of stuff must be colorized, we predict that every guest will try to throw stars into the bonfire because other things in our world are more static than the bonfire. Besides, a dynamic bonfire that does not have the color of the flame is eye-catching.
Make it right or make it satisfying?
Initially, our game's objective was to give the right color to every object on the island. For example, the leaf should be green, and the sea should be blue. However, during the playtest, we found that players were frustrated by this objective. Instead of solving a puzzle that even a kindergarten child knows the answer to, players find it more attractive to give leaves a shiny blue color or give bonfire a spooky green color that they don't usually see in real life.
After self-reflection, we believe letting our guests satisfy themselves in this warm world is far more important.