Story background:

The main concept coming from a conversation with my grandparents. They said China is developing so fast, every year the environment surrounding us is shifting. The place we lived right now used to be a forest just 20 years ago, and now the land has been covered with residential buildings and shopping malls. So I want to create an immersive VR game to tell the story and also be playful and interactive with the environment. I decide my game sketch to be an aesthetic puzzle and adventure game on iOS device.

Mechanism:

• Taking accelerometer sensors from a smartphone so the player can turn around head to look at and explore the environment.
• Looking down at a certain angle, the player can move forward
• Interacting(tapping) with the tree to make them rise to the sky (tree ceremony).
• Player need to make a decision about which tree to select and which area to go, she/he will receive a seed after making a right decision and lose a seed when after making a wrong decision.
• Player need to plant the seed to the ground in a certain area.
• After every tree in the scene going to a safe place there will be an animation tell how many forest are disappearing each year and please be appreciate to what we took from the nature and pay them back.
• Game will start from beginning

Process:

I tried to build iOS game before, but it getting confusing when GoogleVr, Xcode, iOS and Untiy3d all release their latest version and make a big change of their calling functions. And there aren’t any uptodate tutorials online. So I decided to find a more steady combination of versions and build out the game one by one.

So I first follow the tutorial from this and to see if my iPhone can be built with unity file. It’s a simple interaction of tapping the cube to make it spin, and it has been successfully built out.

Unity window

Iphone screen

 Then after some research I choose to install the Unity 5.6.1.f1 with GoogleVR (2017 May), my iPhone is in version 11.1.2, my Xcode is in version 9.2. These are crucial elements when building VR game to iOS devices in the Unity player setting and Xcode. After importing with GoogleVR package to unity, I checked out the demoscene with main interactions and build it out to test. I faced a problem that I couldn’t build out on my iPhone successfully. So when unity builds out the game for iOS devices, it will create a folder contains the file that can be read from Xcode and then Xcode will build to the iOS devices. After some research I found that it’s different to build out the iOS game with iOS VR game. For iOS game we need to run the .xcodeproj file in Xcode and for iOS VR game we need to run the .scworkspace file instead.

Unity window

Iphone screen

After all the technical issues solved, I can start to create my own game sketch. I followed this tutorial to write a new script to move in a VR environment and then I followed this tutorial to write a new script to make my trees rising to the sky. I download a free assets to put as a place holder for my tree and add particles system as a child of tree to add more effects. And then finally I followed this tutorial to add a background sound in my scene.

Conclusion:

I still have some glitches on my screen after building to my ios devices, I would love to fix that for my future development. I also want to explore more interactions in a VR game and take more advantage of built-in sensors in iOS devices. Many interesting interactions like VR gaze loading and some suggestions from the class like nodding head to one object. I would keep in mind to take more natural body movement to achieve my intentions and line in with my storytelling.

Game file available at:

Unity Package File

Unity Project File