Milestone 9 (Zineb)

 Overview

For the last milestone of the project, my tasks were more diverse. I got to populate the environment with more assets and lights to make the ambience feel nicer. I added fuse boxes, pipes, and other sci-fi assets. I had fun modelling more assets and decorating the spaceship with them. I also marked the central hub as a safe zone by giving it a different floor texture, which helps distinguish it from the other rooms.

Furthermore, due to the time constraints we had, I simplified the puzzle by putting a cover over it that acts as a box and prevents the player from interacting with it. Once the player defeats the final boss, the cover gets destroyed and the puzzle is revealed. The original plan was to have the boss drop a gem that the player would place into the control panel, and that would activate the puzzle. However, that was something that needed to be cut for the sake of simplicity and time.

Some other tasks I did were applying a particle effect from the Unity Asset Store when the player hits an enemy, so the attack has better visual feedback. Using the same VFX library, I also placed and coded teleportation areas around the spaceship that take the player directly back to the central hub. This was done mainly for accessibility when playing in VR, to reduce motion sickness. Since the player has to go back and forth between different rooms and the central hub to heal, this feature felt necessary. I was also able to add a fading transition, which made the teleportation feel less jarring.

Challenges

I faced two main challenges for this milestone, and both were related to VR. The first one was, again, the swinging motion of the wand. It was really hard to get a specific swing detection that was not too sensitive to every small movement the wand made, so it took a lot of trial and error at the beginning. I tried using the XR interaction velocity, rotation, and a few other methods, but they did not give me the result I wanted. With the help of a YouTube video, I was able to get it working by tracking the wand’s position relative to the player and focusing only on its vertical movement. The script checks how fast the wand is moving up or down, and if that speed passes a set threshold, it counts as a swing. I also added a short cooldown and active time so the swing would not trigger too often or stay active for too long. This made the swing detection more controlled and more reliable.

The second challenge was related to the Meta quest headset. We wanted to test the game with the actual VR headset because it would be much easier and better to experience and test it that way. However, I ran into a lot of problems downloading the correct Android SDK files and versions, and my laptop also made it difficult to add the necessary modules through Unity hub, so I ended up wasting a lot of time on that setup process. When I finally got the game running on the headset using air link, another issue came up: the player was placed too low and kept clipping into the floor.

Successes

The main success for this milestone is that we are getting closer to finalizing the game, and it is all starting to come together. This is visible in our updated Trello board, where there are not many tasks left to finish.

Time spent on this sprint: 58.34hrs Total

Environment Design (Zineb): 5hrs

VR Swinging Motions (Zineb): 7hrs

Teleportation to Central (Zineb): 1hr

Adding Particles to Player Attack (Zineb): 40mins

VR Headset Setup (Zineb): 12hrs

Fixing Final Boss Spawning for VR (Zineb): 1hr

Rigging and Animating Final Boss (Naomi): 3 hours

Health Restoration Chamber (Naomi): 4 hours

Texturing Enemies (Naomi): 1 hour

Enemy implementation into Unity (Naomi): 8 hours

Enemy Spawners (Naomi): 1 hour

Compositing Sound Effects (Naomi): 30 minutes

Implementing Boss Sound Effects (Naomi): 2 hours

Attributions Document (Naomi): 15 minutes

Implementing custom animated hands (Naomi): 2.5 hours

Refining the introduction cutscene (Sumaiya): (2 hours)

Integrating core UI elements (pause/play buttons, health and progress/score bars) into Unity (Sumaiya): (2 hour)

Fixing UI responsiveness (Sumaiya): 40 minutes

Fixing EnemiesKilled counter issue: (Sumaiya): 1hour

Updating game instructions (Sumaiya): - ongoing