Bubble Boy
An Interactive Augmented Reality Experience
by Isabel Hennes
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Side Effect
When I began the Bubble Boy project I had the intention to dream big regardless of whether or not I knew how to achieve my goals. I made the decision to make the game mechanics relatively simple because I was entering personally uncharted territory in terms of software. I was so pleased with what I was able to achieve during Square One that I decided to build upon it for Side Effect instead of starting a new project. My master plan for Side Effect which included, game object design, user interface design, and game mechanic implementation seemed beyond my capabilities, but with the help of Emil Polyak I was able to successfully create an augmented reality game designed for an audience of small children.
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I'll admit that I was incredibly intimidated by Unity and Playmaker, so I decided to start the second phase of the project in my comfort zone and work my way up. In order to give the game a little context I wrote a short background story and designed a graphic illustration to accompany the game in Adobe Illustrator. My goal was to write a story silly enough to appeal to little kids without it taking too much time to get through. While I was working in Illustrator I decided to go ahead and build various pieces of the user interface so I would have them ready to go when I was prepared to implement them in Unity. Later in the process I used a Unity asset called PSD 2 Unity Ugui Pro to export my pre-made screens from photoshop directly to Unity.
The next logical step in my process was to design the game objects in Autodesk Maya with which Bubble Boy would eventually interact. In retrospect it would have probably been a smarter idea to export simple geometries and figure out the game mechanics in Unity before spending time modeling in Maya. With that in mind, I did not spend an incredible amount of time modeling the game objects because the focus of the project was less on beautifully modeled assets and more about the actual game itself. All of the models were exported from Maya as OBJ files and given materials in Unity.
The majority of Side Effect was spent learning Unity as I went. I started by placing a single raindrop in the Unity scene and telling it to place randomly based on a certain range in the x, y, and z axis. I ran into multiple problems with the objects either appearing too far away from the camera or deactivating themselves on accident. The most challenging part of the entire project was getting events to fire correctly when Bubble Boy came into contact with other game objects. This part of the project consisted of a lot of trial and error, a lot of help from Emil, and a lot of youtube videos and tutorials. Creating the state machines that controlled the object delays, random floats, and object deactivation was truly a learning curve. Once I got the base actions to work correctly I was able to start to add bells and whistles. In order to add some flair to the game objects I used a free asset package from the Unity store that allowed me to add glows and sparkles to the raindrops, shovel, bucket, and watering can. I also made sure to give each object its own unique sound effect that I downloaded from freesound.org.
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The very last step of my project was importing the user interface assets that I designed at the very beginning of Side Effect, and using Playmaker to get them to work correctly. Creating the interface state machines mainly consisted of activating ugui buttons and creating multiple playmaker actions that would turn game objects on and off accordingly.
