January - May, 2017
Planet Creator is a VR experience for the HTC Vive that let's players experience and take part in planet formation. It focuses on mixing experimentation and puzzles to teach players about the formation and chemical composition of planets in our solar system. Jump ahead to the result.
Created in partnership with Fire-Point Interactive as part of the Master’s of Digital Media degree at The Centre of Digital Media.
Create a VR experience that combines fun puzzle mechanics with an educational astronomy experience for kids.
Planet Creator teaches players about planet formation by combining different chemical elements with a forming planet (proto-planet) during the early stages of the solar system. Players explore by teleporting between large asteroid platforms, which each contain smaller chemical asteroids, using the artificial satellite platform as a landmark and control center.
Players can expirment in formation of different planets in the Solar System by throwing smaller asteroids of chemical elements into the proto-planet. Different combinations of elements will create each of the planets in our Solar System, roughly corresponding to their actual chemical composition.
We explored other astronomy based VR experiences to find inspiration and identify potential market gaps and opportunities.
We then narrowed our approach down to a number of ideas and learning objectives, and flushed them out developed ideas.
We created lo-fi prototypes to test the puzzles, mechanics, physics, learning outcomes, and overall feasibility.
While testing out mechanics and puzzles, we also mapped out each step of the experience to help keep track of the user journey and decisions players would need to make.
A full storyboard of the experience was created to help visualize and review the holistic experience before any production work began.
Lastly, we got down to the nitty gritty of work of building, testing, and iterating on gameplay, along with adding UI, polishing features, animations, and minor enhancements.
Blue hues were used to give the in-game screens a neon glowing effect and distinguish from the background colours. Orange was used solely as an accent for the "Restart" button.
Exo DemiBold was used to give the larger text (e.g. Labels, titles) a sort of "Sci-Fi" feeling, while Raleway was used for smaller text to ensure readability.
(Click for in-game screenshot.)
(Click to enlarge)
This was the first time any of us on the team had built something in virtual reality, and there were a lot of challenges and learning opportunities including: