Ideation
The prompt for the second round of Building Virtual Worlds was making an AR experience for the "naive guest", where we could not use explicit direction to the guest.
Laser Mom is an Oculus Quest 2 Passthrough augmented reality game made for ETC Building Virtual Worlds.
The team was comprised of five ETC students, tasked to create an AR experience in two weeks using Quest 2's passthrough functionality.
AR Stealth
We communicated with several ETC faculty trying to understand how to make an AR game that makes use of it's platform and not make a VR game. We consulted with Jesse Schell, where he spoke about a previous project that overlayed invisible virtual items on physical items to give the illusion of a digital character running on real boxes. I had thought about this concept for a while, thinking about how creating environments for play. This is where I thought of a stealth game, physically hiding behind boxes to avoid detection. When pitching this to my teammates, we bounced the idea back and forth, turning the setting from a generic robbery to a silly stealing candy in the kitchen game.
Playtesting
To see if we wanted to build the stealth game, we decided to roleplay what the game would feel like. I played as the virtual character, the mom, who was searching for the player character, the child. We played a few rounds of this and decided that this is the direction we wanted to go. It was fun, fast, and intuitive.
Table
With our idea solidified, we rushed to build our project. We only had a week and a half to go, so we had to work quickly to complete it. We constructed our kitchen table out of a cardboard box and used it in conjunction with the grayboxed prototype to test the game.
Mom Model
I was in charge of making the 3D model and animating the mom character. I had never modeled a character before, only items and simple animals, so this was exciting and difficult. It took me a few attempts to get it to a place where I was comfortable sending it over to the other artist to be rigged.
Table Adjustment
After a few playtests, we felt the table was a little too low for guests to comfortable crawl around it, so we used more boxes to extent the height.
Playtesting
We had several non-ETC students experience our game to see how intuitive the mechanics and process was. We took down their feedback and made adjustments to game accordingly.
Final
Here is a video of the final product being played by a naive guest.