Character A is afraid of Character B

Our first prompt was something everyone is familiar with: Character A is afraid of Character B, help Character A.

At the Entertainment Technology Center, every student is required to go through an immersion semester. During that semester we all take the class Building Virtual Worlds where we are randomly broken up into teams or 4 to 5 people, and have 2 weeks to create a final game or experience given a prompt.

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As a team, we decided to first come up with Character A and Character B before focusing on gameplay. After a few brainstorming sessions, our team noticed the pattern that all of us were suggesting natural predators. We had come up with a few ideas while disregarding the gameplay and level design, but when we began to develop the game further we noticed that we had the natural tendency to overcomplicate things to a point where 2 weeks would not be enough time to fully complete what we had planned.

We decided to go with a shark and fish in order to keep things simple so that we would be able to focus more on gameplay and level design.

To my surprise, working with HTC VIVE was much more simple than I had anticipated. To use VIVE with Unity, it was as easy as a simple download from the Unity Store, and drag and drop into the game.

In order to drag the fish, I added the tag GRABBABLE to them and checked the tag when the VIVE trigger was pressed and was colliding with the fish.

For our halfway point, our goal was to get the basic gameplay down but afterwards we ran into one major problem: WE NEVER CONSIDERED WHAT ROLE THE GUEST WAS PLAYING.

We came up with the idea of blasting the shark away with some sort of whirlpool pretty early on in a brainstorming session, but what could the guest be without adding too much backstory or overcomplicating the gameplay?

A squid? But why would a squid be helping fish when squid eat fish?

A god of the sea? Why was a god of the sea helping the fish but not the shark?

A diver? How could a diver have the power to blast a shark away?

However, there was one other thing we did not consider: once we told the guest who they were, they would accept it and focus on the gameplay. We all agreed on a diver holding a tiny octopus because it wasn’t too foreign for the guest if they are still human.