Learning VR Game Design through Udacity's VR Developer Program

Udacity’s Puzzler Project

By

Fritz Templin

This is my puzzler project for Udacity’s VR developer program. The main focus of this project is game design and the game design process.  In this short article I will show you how I approached the game design process for this project. Enjoy!

First here is a quick video of the finished game project.

In the game design process it is important right from the beginning to know for who, and why you are designing the application. For this project I created a persona, and used this as my typical VR game user for this application. In a real development application research into the actual market and user that you are trying to connect with will be essential to the success of your project. Creating an awesome game that no one is interested in will not bring much more than your self satisfaction for completing it. 

Meet Michael.

Name: Michael,

Age: 13 – 45

Occupation: Do I really need a job to play games?

Quote: Get your game on!

VR Experience level: New to VR just starting to experiment with mobile VR applications.

This game player will like to solve puzzles and challenges. They will most likely be using a smart phone in combination with a VR head set. Performance and lightweight resource overhead will be major considerations to insure a high level of functionality for the targeted devices.

Next I needed a rough sketch of the application that I would be making. It is important that the technique used to create the sketch allows for quick creations. You will likely need to make a number of changes as you iterate through your project with user feedback and test runs.

Your first sketch should give you a general idea and layout details will be added through iteration.

Sketching new ideas or changes as you come to them.

Adding sketches for more detail to objects or scenes. 

With your sketches completed you can begin your build using the sketches as blue prints to work from.

As you build continual iteration and improvements are made such as changing the name, text instructions or highlighting buttons on gaze as was done on the panels above. While game testing and from user feedback see through panel aesthetic were discovered to look better than the original solid panel did.

User testing and feedback is essential to creating and interesting and compelling application. It is also important in VR application to help avoid simulator sickness and create natural feeling movements and comfortable game ergonomics.

Asking open ended questions that encourage insightful and non-directed input from the testers is important.  One of the questions I used for this game development was, “Please describe the environment and the mood you are feeling from it. “. One of the responses to this question was “a simple stone room with two doors that feels rustic and gloomy, with a strange light shining on some floating balls”.  With follow up questions on key parts of the test users response I was able to deduce that improvement was need in the lighting of the orbs, the complexity of the room and enhancement of the environment with fog.

 Adding a layer of fog and some fire animations to the surrounding mountain terrain helped to enhance the mysterious and ominous feel of the environment.

Adding the fire animation on the torches added complexity and movement to the interior scene.

Adding individual spot lights improved the glowing appearance I was going for on the orbs

Later tester responses like this one, “I feel like I am in a spooky torch lit dungeon with glowing spheres floating in the room.”, showed me that the changes I made were moving the game feel in the intended direction.

Currently the game is still a simple VR experience that can be enjoyed and tested by users who are new to the VR environment. It is also a solid building block and concept piece that could be added to and enhanced to become a deep and interesting game application. I will expand by adding new rooms with different and more challenging puzzles that users can work their way through and become immersed in the game.

If you are interested in down loading the project please feel free to visit my Github account to get it.

Github account

Week 15: Social media and its place in busines.s

Social Media and its Place in Business.

I have learned a lot about social media and its place in business today. It has been very insightful to have looked at all the different platforms and their place in the business world.  For many businesses social media can be a very useful tool. For me I have found some great ideas and hope to continue to improve and expand my use of the social media platforms. It is an exciting time in both digital media and the business environment. With all of the new technological changes come some very good opportunities for people to capitalize on. New business models based on the digital world are showing up every day. I hope that I am able to benefit from some of the strategies that we have learned about in this class over the last weeks. The low cost and availability of the social media platforms allows us to hone our marketing skills and test our theories. It is up to us to grasp these opportunities and make something of them. This seems to me to be the most access we have had to information and communication as a society ever. It will only take our own determination and application of skill to make use of it and reap the benefits and rewards. I feel like I have been made aware of all the tools that are there for me to use and now it is simply up to me to put them to use. I hope that you can find your voice and success in social media as well.

Week 14: Online Strategy

On Target - Online Strategy

Creating a strategy is like laying out your road map and often your success will depend greatly on the accuracy, detail and execution of that planned strategy. For my goal of creating a multi-platform news and educational collection online content will be the backbone. this will mean dedicating time each week to create new content and build the available library of useful information that followers will search out. Since this is not my main enterprise and will have to be done in my spare time. I will plan on a slow but continuous growth.

I will need time to find, research and deliver new topics each week. Thankfully finding and researching these projects can correlate to my studies for my full time job in IT and my continued study as I pursue my higher educational degrees. I believe that if I can dedicate one half hour a day
twice a week to creating a post on Facebook, which is linked to Twitter, that will be sufficient for now. I will also need to use one hour once a week to create a rich textual and visual blog post each week. This blog post will also be linked to Facebook and Twitter. Along with the previous mentioned platforms I estimate that I will

need one and a half hours each week to create a new educational video for my YouTube channel. By applying this strategy over the next six months I will be able to build a small library of content that I can use to measure my followers interest statistically.

After analyzing this data I would hope to gain a better understanding of the specific types of content that followers are interested in and the level of interest as the have as well. I should be able to deduce the desire or, lack there of, for the amount of content I am posting and adjust that as well. I realize that there are great tools at my disposal but their effectiveness will depend on my ability and determination to use them.

Week 14: Class Blog Comments.

Here are the blogs that I commented on this week.

Chris Deddo

Gjonbalaj,Leslie

Johnson,Angie

Rojas,Miguel

Stager,Melissa

Week 14: The Right Social Media for Me.

The Right Social Media Platforms for Me.

Over the past fourteen weeks I have experimented with and investigated different social media platforms. The experience has given me some valuable insight into which ones I prefer to use and the capabilities of some that I did not know about. I have found that some are easier than others and some allow you to provide a richer content. Overall I have enjoyed getting to know more about the platforms and the potential they hold for business. I will continue to test and investigate new platforms and changes made to existing ones, because in this media change is constant. For now the social media platforms that I have decided to focus on are the following.

Facebook is an easy platform to use and access, with a huge user base. The easy ability to create posts even on mobile devices is very enticing. The amount of analytic data regarding your  content performance is also outstanding and should allow anyone the ability to refine their content and delivery to achieve the best effectiveness quickly. It would be tough not to include Facebook in any social media strategy.

Twitter was not a social media that I had used a lot before this class, but I have really grown to like and respect it. Twitter has a constant flow of great information, if you set up who you follow correctly. I have been surprised by the amount of interaction on this platform. I have found that by linking content posts from my other media platforms that it is easy to keep a flow of posts going to Twitter. I have often found more reader response on twitter than the other platforms. For me Twitter is a keeper. 

YouTube for teaching or demonstrating is by far my favorite choice. A good video to me is the best way for someone to really see what you are trying to show them. The size of the reach for YouTube is enormous and hard to compete with. In my opinion YouTube is another must have media for an online strategy. I definitely need to work on my reluctance to create videos. And then create more content for this platform regularly.

Blogger is an easy to use format, and I have become more comfortable with it the more I use it. To me your blog is the place that allows you to create mixed visual and textual content that can be rich and in depth. Writing for me does not always come easy and so it is a bit of a struggle to get my self to create the posts on a regular schedule. I am hoping that with time that will change and it will be good practice for me to continue to blog. I will try to keep a blog as part of my online presence.

Week13: Facebook Insights

Facebook Insights

Facebook Insights is a very comprehensions and powerful collection of data about your Facebook business or fan page. This information can be used to show you the path to creating content that your followers like and interact with. It is so in depth that you can compare how your posts do at different times of the day for each day of the week and if your followers disapprove of the post.

For my page insights look I can see that overall my like count increased at a modest rate, mostly due to classmates from my social media class. Thank you guys for that. The rest of the news on my pages statistics is not very good I can see that my Reach  and my Engagement have both decreased by a significant amount.  As I researched why I can see that this is partly because of the lack of posts for this time period.

The ability to compare individual posts is a great way to judge what type of content and delivery approach is most likely to have the best results. Creating and posting content in a scientific or systematic way will help me to narrow down the most effective content and styles. I can also review the posts to see content that I have already touched on and also content that may warrant follow up. The "boost post" button is always an option and in this format it is easy to analyze which content would be best for choosing this action.

Facebook Insights also gives you the ability to compare your page to similar pages and see how you stack up. This was pretty overwhelming for me at first glance. Their are some pages that have very impressive stats and it is hard to imagine actually competing with them. That being said it is a great tool if you compare it statistically and adjust for size. You can gain an idea of the total potential for people interested in your subject matter and set goals for activity and growth. Once you get past the initial shock you can just look at it as a long term road map. I think it is definitely worth using and intend to put more time into it myself. 

Overall I think that my first priority regarding my page is to keep up with the content posts. I can see that the lack of posts is my biggest weakness, so far. Thanks for reading and good luck with your Facebook pages.

Week 13: Google Analytics

Google Analytics

Google analytic is a powerful tool that can help you analyze your blog or website. It provides data on many different aspects of your site and user interaction. You can see how many new users have visited or how many return users you have. You can see what devices and which browser they are using. you can see what pages they are viewing , how many they are viewing, and how long they are viewing them. There are many more analytic aspects that you should look at yourself. 

Some of the ones that I find to be most important to me are new users, session duration, and returning visitors. I like these because they give me a good idea of how my site is growing and if my viewers are reading the content. New users is important to see if you are expanding your reach and gaining new followers. You can also dig into this to see where they are coming from and what they are using.

Returning users I think is very important also. You want your returning users to grow as a percentage of your new users. Watching this percentage of returning users compared to your new users can be a helpful tool for modifying content. The higher percentage of returning users should be an indicator that more of your visitors are interested by your content. Session duration is an important to monitor because it will tell you if your visitors are actually viewing content or just bouncing through. A growing session duration can be a good indicator of the quality a of your content and your followers level of interest in it.

Even if you don't use Google Analytics, you should use some measurement tool to see how your site is doing in several of these aspects. If you can see what is working and what is not you have no way of fixing it.