Curious Case

Documenting the progress and journey of designing, developing Curious Case a hybrid AR murder mystery game

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360VR Art Test

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For testing purposes!

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This week would have been the opening for Origin Stories. Although the world has been a bit locked down for a hot minute and might be for a while more-it's been a period of learning to be more mindful, taking breaks and taking care of yourself and others if you can.

That being said this little Curious Case that could continues on and hopes to bring you mysteries to solve soon.

Until then take care and stay safe! 👍

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Memory chip label design, implanted within the noggin as simple as, brought to you by Simulacra Corp.

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Was able to get the basics of the AR map and Memory log functionality done this weekend and connect a small MVP demo at the end of the game jam.

Some things I learned were:

1) Dynamically changing XR settings at runtime and using the Magic Window implementation for hybrid apps using Google Cardboard SDK. Will have to implement a VR mode toggle as a quality of life update after some playtesting.

2) Blender has awesome modifiers that unfortunately do NOT translate well to Unity, so will explore procedural animations/visual shader graph instead.

3) Was able to have some guest appearances from friends throughout the weekend to collaborate on some voice acting & writing. Which was SO fun!

4) Accessiblity for the audio portions of the experience will be something of interest in the future. Whether it's a toggle feature or just built in with both audio & text will be something to test with players to see what is the most optimal level of information without cognitive overload.

5) Churros are so good but messy.

✏️🤯sprawling chaos while writing w/ Julia

It was really nice to work with some other folks around to at least chat with. This has been a collaborative but mostly solo endeavor on my part so it was refreshing to walk around and see what other folks were working on!!

Anyways next steps will be debugging the dialogue as well as adding a proper Game Manager for saving states throughout the game.

Will also be sharing more UI designs in a few!

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Once you have a 3D Layout, its easy to render specific points with a 360VR perspective. Cycles is a bit weird with materials, but alot of post-processing can also be done in the latest photoshop and aftereffects!

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Making maps, high contrast for legibility is key. Next is optimizing scale!

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Going through some historical archives of city maps to find sources of inspiration for some level/puzzle design. Sometimes the most rich details are found just outside your doorsteps. 🔎

This was made through a Blender GIS plugin that literally took me 5 minutes to build out- which has all the height maps for elevation, buildings, waterways, roads built in!! 🤯🤯 ABSOLUTELY WILD. This would have taken me a few weeks to model from archival references- and it's all open-source!!!

This was the YouTube tutorial I followed...

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Setting up my studio space for the next lil while!! Gonna have a lot of quiet evenings and weekends here jamming away 😎👩‍💻👌

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Setting up a barebones dialogue system for chatting with NPCs. Aiming for the interface to emulate that of the smartphone UI.

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Curious Case is back in action! 📢🎉

Even though this project has been on hiatus for a year or so, ideas and inspiration have been marinating all the while. We have a new narrative collaborator and just got accepted for DMG's Origin Dev Stories Exhibit (April 9-14th @TMAC) which is focused on reviving games old and new that have come out of DMG run programs in the past 8 years that they've been running!

For the next 2 months stay tuned for updates as we revive Curious Case in a whole new direction...

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Prototyping 3D animations that is tied to the distance of the camera vs. the image tracker.

Interesting to play with space and positional tracking.

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Doors Open TO 2019 demo at TMAC with DMG 🔍

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We managed to crank out another chapter for the April DMG 2019 showcase. It was a very simple setup of a desk, lamp, with a monitor to explain some of the premise/context of the game.

Lots of people showed up and gave our little demo a go with an overwhelming response! Throughout the evening play-tested with visitors and recognized that many got excited and would sometimes brute force it by scanning 3 cards in one go. There was still alot of GM-ing and facilitation going on, but it was a great exercise in communicating the concept of the game as a hybrid phygital board game, getting inspo from visitors, and figuring out ideas for more thoughtful intentional gameplay in the future.

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Ramping up for the April 2019 DMG showcase, we wanted to flesh out what Chapter 1 of the story looks like so I created more evidence cards to introduce the serttings and some other characters to further the narrative.

One thing that was challenging was how to gate the experiences as we didn't want the player to be overwhelmed/spoil the story at the beginning by presenting all the evidence in one go. This would remain a very interesting challenge to negotiate as I was looking to build out the rest of the narrative.

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The person depicted above is the victim of this AR murder mystery card game...BUT she's not real and is actually one of the many faces generated from thispersondoesnotexist.com

This Person Does Not Exist

I really wanted to experiment with different generative ways of making content. Partially because I didn't have the means/time to produce, hire actors, and create alot bespoke content when there were so many possibilities a variables for card combinations

This eventually led me down some really interesting ML generation tools for faces, voices, 3D objects and even writing sims! On the one hand... it's terrifying how easy it is to generate doctored content these days?? But on the other hand as the world of AR/VR/XR collide with IRL, I believe more and more generative and procedural ways of creating simulated content will be necessary to populate those digital realities in a feasible manner.

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I met a great group of collaborators at DMG's Feb Fatale 7: Killing Cyberpunk where we broke down the narrative that was inspired by The Curious Case of Ronald Opus.

At the end we were able to create a MVP with 3 evidence cards.

The core mechanic/gameplay was using your phone as a magnifying glass to scan and reveal more information about each evidence card. However when you combine certain cards together you can actually unlock select content and are able to dive further into the story. It was a very simple demo but showed alot of potential!