My Ordinary AR LIFE Alpha Dev Log - Designing Minigames and Creating Assets

Devlog by Braeden Hammill

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Designing the Minigames

Minigame Guidelines

During a team meeting we set a goal to come up with five solid mini game ideas which will be tasks on the players to-do list. Our main mechanic of changing the environment with your AR headset has loads of potential. To prevent ourselves from getting too carried away the team established some guidelines that each mini game should follow.

1. All minigames must be designed around grabbing and throwing

The players primary form of interaction is grabbing and throwing physics objects. Keeping this consistent across all minigames will help players understand the games quickly and will be more efficient since we don't need to spend more development time on new mechanics. 

2. Enhancing a task with AR changes its presentation not the action

To save ourselves from designing twice as many minigames, the action of each task will be the same whether it's enhanced by AR or not. The objective of a task can be altered slightly but the core action should stay the same, the difference will be in its presentation (Example: Throwing trash into a garbage bin could become a basketball minigame when you put on the AR headset. The presentation has changed from throwing out trash to throwing a basketball, the action of throwing an object into a bin doesn't change).

3. Choice of long-term health or Instant gratification?

Each task should feel repetitive and mundane. This will hopefully tempt players to put on their AR headset which will make the tasks much easier and more fun. Fun will come in the form of satisfying visual and auditory feedback to make each action dispense a hit of dopamine. Tasks might also receive a creative twist that still keeps the core action intact. (Example: Throwing robot vacuum cleaners out a window instead of onto their charging pads.) The downside of doing this will be that you never complete the task properly. After your fun is over, taking off the headset reveals that you have made an even bigger mess of things. On the other hand, if you choose to complete a task without using your headset, players should be rewarded with something inspiring or heartfelt that calls back to your humanity. (Example: Uncovering a kind note from a family member which was buried under all the trash you finally threw away).

Minigame Example: Charge Roombas

After establishing those three guidelines, I started a document which breaks down all five minigames along with a storyboard to visualize each one. To keep this brief, I'll share one of the mini games from this document.

Basic Task: Collect five Robot Vacuums which are all over the house. Some are stuck and others are quick and hard to catch. Once you grab one, return it to the charging station.

Basic Task Complete: Once all five Robot Vacuums are in the charging station, they all play a cute jingle. (Inspiration from how the turrets sing in Portal)

AR Enhancement: The Robot Vacuums become tiny alien creatures. You must throw them into a portal (your window) to send them back to their home planet.

AR Enhancement Complete: Your window is broken, and all of your robot vacuums are gone. You receive a pop-up ad on your headset encouraging you to buy the new robot vacuum 2.0.

Assets Progress

I found a good-looking free asset kit for the apartment, but we will need lots of custom 3D and 2D assets for the mini games. I got to work on an asset list for each mini game.

The asset list is still a work in progress, but this covers about 50% of the custom assets we will need. Assets are ranked as low medium or high importance which will determine the order, I complete them. Lower priority ones will get sourced from an asset store if I run out of time.

I hadn't done any 3D modeling in a few weeks, so I decided to make the Monkey Doll asset as a warmup since it had a simple design.

The final art-related work I did was design the interface of the headset. 

Using the concept art from preproduction as a reference, I designed two pieces of UI that will appear when you wear the headset. The left is your task list, and the right is your messages window. I think the clean and minimalist aesthetic is appealing but I'm considering adding more elements on the screen like a space for ads to appear.

Minigame Prototype

I completed my tasks ahead of schedule, so I had time to make a prototype of my Robot Vacuum minigame concept. You can search for the vacuum's, pick them up, and throw them at their charging stations. The charging station has a trigger that snaps the robot vacuum to its origin. If you Enhance the task with your AR headset the robot vacuums become aliens that you can throw through a "portal".