Co-Presence
A visual language about human ambient movement.
VR Designer, 3D Modeler, UX Researcher, UX Designer
January 2021 - May 2021
individual project
After Effect, Cinema 4D, Rhino, Grasshopper
Background
This project intended to establish a visual language that depicts human's ambient movements. The visualization creates a sense of co-location between people under the current Covid-19 circumstances.
Concept
Ambient Information is the information presented in the periphery. We’ve all had experience that you can tell a person’s state by your peripheral vision and triggered a conversation, but the quarantine has made this experience impossible. The ambient information is key for us to understand people's state, whether he/she is happy, focused, worried, etc. The sense of presence is created through the continuous awareness of other people’s state.
Core Problem
Moving to the digital world, there’s a different degree of Abstraction to a human being, and the representation of a human becomes an icon or a symbol. In the real world, you may have an experience like telling from the footsteps to recognize it was your mom or dad, that kind of experience coming from human’s physicality is gradually being replaced.
Objectives
The primary objective of each level is to discover where the music is coming from and to pick up the stranded musician. Before reaching the stranded musician, multiple checkpoint planets throughout the level must first be reached and their rhythmic patterns completed. After reaching the musician, the player unlocks the next level where another song is heard, which means there is another friend to be made.
Dependency Diagram
Level Design
The main goal of level design in Astrobeat is to reward players for optimal gameplay by providing a smooth and satisfying experience. When done perfectly, all movement will align with the background music. Movement is intended to feel much more intuitive than intentionally planned out. The core style of Astrobeat is relatively fast-paced gameplay with limited opportunity to strategize and plan for upcoming obstacles. While the players are able to complete levels without moving perfectly, making fewer mistakes gives a significantly more gratifying experience.
The first few levels are designed to focus specifically on teaching the fundamentals of movement and core challenges, such as rhythmic movement, found in Astrobeat. From there, the difficulty of levels gradually increases via the addition of new challenges, more difficult rhythm patterns, faster background music, etc. However, it is essential for levels to be relatively concise to avoid too much frustration. As it is almost necessary for players to repeat a level multiple times in order to perfect movement through the level, longer, more drawn out levels would detract from the intended style of gameplay. The objective is for players to repeat levels in quick succession in order to perfect level completion. Much of the satisfaction arises from success after repeated failures.
Paper prototype
Initial Sketch
JSON Levels in Photoshop
Final Screenshots
Design Collections
Astrobeat is a visually appealing game with low-poly style assets mainly built in Blender. As a designer for this game, I did various design jobs such as logo design, level design, modeling and animation. Here are some final assets in our game.
Biome Themed Planets
Our planet biomes are inspired by real climate on Earth. To match our overall theme of finding life in great universe, we make reference on some similar climate. Desert, for example, may seem lifeless at first, contains stunning drought tolerant plants.
Logos
Animations
laser shooting asteroid rotating asteroid moving asteroid colliding
rocket bouncing 1 rocket bouncing 2 rocket crashing jumping into end goal portal
Game Trailer
This trailer goes over easy, medium and hard levels and explains basic gameplays and design ideations of the game.
sound on :)