The process of planning a storybased game exercise
29/04/2021
The 5th exercise of the Migael project is on its way! The exercise is about the work steps and safety in the drift and it goes through them in detail and comprehensively. MiGaEL’s development team made the decision create the game from a storybased premise where the player is a new trainee at the mine. The story proceeds under the guidance of a supervisor and the trainee gets to learn how the whole process works in the drift. The player is allowed to interactively participate and react to different situations, and at the end, test their own skills and knowledge.
But how is this game exercise made? This blog explains how the process of planning and making the 5th exercise has begun!
It begun with written manuscript and sketching
The work began with a manuscript in which the flow and functions of all the different stages of the work were written. The perspective was then made into a narrative and the dialogues were made to fit the supervisor’s tone. The work steps included player-activating tests and actions to move the story forward. Once the script was complete and broken down into clear sections, it was time to start creating the sections in the virtual world in Unity.
Making of the game started with creating one section at a time, allowing the plot to be built forward in small steps, which at the end make up the whole story. To make it easier to visualize the different phases, we decided to make storyboards to clarify what we were supposed to code and to help to see the common goal.
The storyboards are quickly done and seem jagged, but they make it immensely easier to spot problem-areas and perceive the whole picture. Below you can see the storyboard which goes through the drilling phase.
Creating the world
Still, the script is not sufficient enough in itself to visualize the whole story. So the team began to create a personality and character traits for the supervisor by drawing, modeling and typing – and later also by voice-acting and with motion track animations, from which you can read more about in another blog later!
The appearance of the character was first created by drawing, after which the modeler began to make a 3D model according to the plan.
At the same time as the character began to be structured, the team’s engineers started building the virtual world and the story in terms of the storyboard. Little by little, the mine has begun to look like a mine and the plot is moving forward. Time will tell how this exercise turns out to be like when completed!
This is how the 5th exercise of the MiGaEL project has started! More information on the progress can be found on the migael.fi website!