Under Sand Walking Sim Postmortem

Under Sand Walking Sim Postmortem

Jeffery Xue

Introduction

Under Sand is a walking simulator for curious casual player. The goal of this game is to build an environment with ancient elements in it but tell a futuristic story. The environment and level design should also encourage player to explore in it and make them feel curious about the environment and the story behind it. This game is developed in Unity and focus on web platform. This game planned to use terrains, models, textures, particle effects,

and lights to build an interesting and navigable 3D scene.

What went right

1.Storytelling

There are a lot of storytelling elements, including visual, audio, particle effects, in this game. Player are attracted by those elements, and then they will be curious to explore the story behind this world by finding other storytelling elements in the scene. Those elements are showed to players following a certain sequence in the game. At the beginning of the game, players will hear a sound of explosion and falling, and they will see a UFO in the game. When players walk into the scene, they will saw an ancient ruin with some marine animal fossils. These storytelling elements hint that players are not normal person, and this place is not a common desert. When the player walk in to the second scene, they will see some wall paintings that explain the story behind this world and help player to interpret the storyline. I don’t expect players to understand the storyline as same as I do, but these storytelling elements can help to arouse the curiosity of players to explore this game.

2.Consistency

Most elements in this game are related to each other, which makes this game more consistent. Elements that I put in the game are following my goals, the futuristic ancient ruins. For example, the sound of digital failure and a crashed UFO, the desert terrain and fossils, those elements are related to each other and contribute to build a consistent scene. Moreover, in the progress I remove and change some elements from the scene, and that also help to the consistency. In the second tomb scene, originally I put some skeleton here, but when I playtested it I thought they may scare casual players and they are not consist with the major emotion, curiosity, in this game. The collectibles in the game are also changed from gold coins to sci-fi mechanical parts, which are more realistic in the scene comparing to the coins.

3.Audio

Audio is really helpful to the storytelling in this game, it also able to attract player and make this world more immersive. There are both 2D and 3D spatial sound in the game. For example, the 3D sound of digital failure at the beginning of the scene will tell player to turn around and see a crashed UFO. When player collect a collectables, there is a “ding” sound to reward the player. The desert scene also have an audio clip of wind that consistent with the dust effect in the game. These sound effects work a lot to make player feel curious to explore in the game.

What went wrong

1.Scale

The scale of objects in this game make players confused about who they are. In this game I make the protagonist into a small alien, so I make everything else in the game into a larger scale. Player may notice that the scale of this world is different, but they cannot figure out the size of their character because there lacks a reference object at the start point of the game. Maybe a huge bush will be helpful to inform players who they are.

2.Start and End Page

This game do have a start and end pages, but they are really simple. When I designed them I thought that they are not import in this project, so I just leave some text on them to tell player how to play the game. Actually the start and end pages are really important to player’s experience and will influence on the consistency of the game. Next time I will do more work on design these pages.

3.WebGL Export

The Web export looks different than what they are in the Unity editor. The light and shadow system is not working correct in the first and second scene, and the post processing effect is also not working in the first scene. I only have enough time to fix the shadow problem in the second scene, and other problems are still existing. The project is focus on web platform so it’s sad that players cannot see some features when they play the game. Next time I will leave more time to debug in exporting process.

What I learned

In this project, I learned that the importance of consistency in a game. The consistent elements in the game will make the game feel more immersive.  It’s also important to inform the player who they are, and a reference object will helpful to let them know the scale of the character. The start and end pages in the game are also important because the player will see them at the start, and decide they want to player or not based on them. They should be related to the other elements and I will put more work on them next time. Moreover, I will leave more time in my next project for webGL exporting and debugging process.