Robots Story is a VR experience for Oculus Quest inspired by Baobab studios that invites users to embark on a quest to retrieve the energy orb powering a friendly robot’s planet. This project was created in a 1-week sprint for Dartmouth’s AR/VR Design & Development course.
VR Sprint: Robots Story
Timeframe
Feb 2022
(1 week)
Team
2 designers, 1 developer
Role
experience designer: storyline, assets modeling, animation, rendering
Tools
Unity & Maya
Process
Character building & asset modeling > Animation & Sound> Lighting
The next sections show a brief video demonstration of the project and discuss character building and modeling as well as lighting in more detail.
MVP Demo
Story time!
The orb powering the user’s home planet was stolen and its energy is being harvested by a robot whose ship broke down. The user can retrieve it by trading it for the crystal that will fix the thief’s ship. To win, the user must first travel to a mysterious planet to find the crystal that will power the ship. However, showing up empty-handed will anger the thief and end the game.
Character Building & Modeling: From sketches to contextualized 3D models
I decided to use 2 robot characters to facilitate the storyline: a helper character explaining the context and suggesting the right action to the user and the antagonist who stole the orb. The look and feel of the robots are inspired by Star Wars and a Romanian animation series, RObotzi.
Orb Thief Character
Although the orb thief represents the ‘antagonist’, in keeping with the general ludic atmosphere of the game, he is an adorable robot whose only quasi- threatening features are his pointy teeth. The orb thief is modeled as 2 hemispheres that open up to either offer the orb of energy for a winning user, or a debilitating scream for the losing user.
Home Planet Helper Character
The helper character is cute, put together, and worried about his planet. It vaguely resembles human form to be more relatable to the user without triggering the uncanny valley effect. It has a light on his antenna that acts as spotlight in the beginning of the game.
Lighting and Rendering
I strategically placed 10 lights to guide the user experience, only 1 running in real time for enhanced performance.
Baked lights direct focus to the orb thief
Baked lights direct focus to the crystal
An animated spotlight lights the home planet if the orb is retrieved
Challenges & Takeaways
As a result of the short timeframe for this project (1 week), the storyline was relatively simple, the user’s choices limited, and we weren’t able to include all the features and models we originally planned. I learned not to underestimate the time it can take to integrate the different parts of a collaborative Unity project.
For my work on this and other class projects for the AR/VR Design & Development course, I was awarded an academic citation for excellence.