Heritage Sites - AR App
One of the modules under the Master's program at Kingston University was a team project that required game designers to work with UX, Animation and Programming department. We were asked to create a product that could be a game or app on the allotted topic.
Topic & Role
Highlights of the project:​ Accurately depicted historical events of Tower of London with the use of a interactive timeline, re-living the important events by playing a simulation in AR, Educational/Detective experience
Team Size: 7
The game part of the app
Heritage Sites is an AR app prototype, developed under the topic "Interactive Cultural Spaces". The concept focuses on improving visitor experience to the usual day to day visit, with the help of technology. For this topic, our team decided to create an app that covered historical locations which would help users understand the architectural changes and educate them about important facts. We did this with a the help of an interactive timeline, and a scenario that they could play in AR to relive the important events. For the purpose of this prototype, we chose the "Tower of London".
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Handling team and it's communications.
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Researching - Tower of London.
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Creating a game simulated historical events.
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Quest Development, In-game NPC placement and level setup.
Tools used: Unity, Google Forms, Trello, MS Word, MS Powerpoint, Draw.io, Adobe Xd
Researching
Besides a game designer, our team had 4 UX'ers, an animator, a programmer. This lead to the decision of creating an app and not a full scale game, since it was necessary that everyone had equal amounts of work to do.
My work began with the selection of building and Tower of London seemed best fit, since it had gone through a large amount architectural change. It also had the best story pieces that could inspire interesting gameplay.
Articles were referred to, to understand what was needed for the game to dispense facts accurately and keep the users entertained at the same time. All materials emphasized on ensuring that games shouldn't force players to memorize location or dates, but instead let them automatically interact with these pieces of information. This information needed to depicted in memorable manner.
I then planned a day trip to visit the Tower of London and gathered some valuable information, including photographs that were sent to the animator for proper referencing. During my visit one of the stories that inspired my gaming decisions was the "Murder of the Two princes" at the Bloody Tower. Having the users solve a mystery by playing this incident as a simulation felt best.
Design Process
I created a small scale player class system to make sure that no one felt left out in terms of enjoying the game. It was understood that not everyone playing the simulation would have had experience with gaming, and hence three classes were created for the prototype - Planner, Collector, and Social. This way people with low to high experience along with people looking to play with friends were all included.
The gameplay structure was defined next, beginning with understanding that the simulation would resemble a detective situation, where the player would have to speak around with NPC's or look for objects in the level.
Since the chosen scenario was Murder of two princes, players would have to complete 5 quests to understand what had happened at the location, and the site relevance to the incident.
I decided that the level would take place in AR, since this way, players will make use of the site by scanning real life objects/locations of the historical site that they're visiting, and hence remembering the relevance.
The interactions and mechanics were kept fairly simple, since the users were present at the location for a limited time.
Player Classes
Level & Prototype
After the animator had created the 3D model of the Tower of London, I used the model to map out the locations and placements of NPC's and quest related objects. Here are few glimpses of the level.
Complete level
NPC placement
Once the level setup was completed, these were added into the prototype and the quests were implemented. The lighting changed drastically since game takes place in AR. The pictures below showcase the first set of events that players need to carry out to complete the quest.
Quest line