The Social Butterfly Experiment

The Social Butterfly Experiment is an immersive experience that leverages the motion capture capabilities of the Lab for Immersive Media (LIM) at UT Austin. This is the first student (Spring 2024) project in the LIM.

Details:

My role: Lead Game Designer
Team size: 9
Dev time: 2 months
Contribution:
- System/Content/Level Design
- Game Design
- Gameplay Programming
- Documentation

The project won the Immersive Media Award at the AET 2024 Showcase.

Made with:

Premise

Players are assigned as interns at the Lab for Investigating Monarchs. As an intern under Professor M, the players are tasked with guiding monarch butterflies from Michigan, all the way to Mexico within a simulation. Interns must guide the butterflies to milkweed while assisting them in avoiding their greatest killer: cars.

In Action

Game Design

Responsibilities

documented game design in GDD for the team to reference throughout development
designed and iterated on level design, game mechanics, and in-game feedback to players based on scope, creative direction, site-specificity, and playtesting
white boxed levels, communicated dimensions to the Creative Team and assisted with asset implementation
worked with Lead Programmer to determine feasibility, implement gameplay mechanics, and finetune gameplay in Unity/C#
Analyzed player feedback and re-designed level layouts and gameplay elements according to said feedback

Pre-Production

I spent the first few weeks ideating on game mechanics and would report back to the producer and creative director to make sure the mechanics fit the narrative. I also spent this time brainstorming the level design of the game and made sure it fit the travel patterns of butterflies.

I documented all of this on the Game Design Document, along with the core loop and the basic gameplay points. This document was frequently referred back to during production.

The team and I also spent the first few weeks ideating and brainstorming the user flow and art styles on a Figjam board. This board was referred back to by every member during production.

Link

Level Design

The most important aspect of the game's level design was to capture the experience of butterflies migrating from the north to the south.

To accurately portray butterfly migration, the creative director and I decided to set the game in one of the most common butterfly travel routes: Michigan to Mexico.

Of course, as a UT student, I had to include Texas and the UT Tower in the level design.

The main mechanics of the game involve the player guiding the butterflies to milkweed and keeping them from being hit by cars.

The placement of milkweed and roads was key in the level design of this game as avoiding cars and getting butterflies to milkweed are the main mechanics of the game. The placement of these assets was iterated upon many times through playtesting and user feedback.

The buildings (colored boxes) acted as obstacles for the players as well. I made sure to place them in ways to depict the regions they were in accurately.

Here's a video of the white box working with the scroll system that I implemented. The speed of the scroll was later adjusted according to players' ability to move around in the LIM

Game Mechanics Testing/Implementation

I worked closely with the lead programmer on planning how game mechanics would be implemented. These game mechanics were ones ideated by myself and written in the GDD.

Butterfly Trailing

I communicated to the lead programmer (Tim Lin) that the most effective trailing system for the experience would be to have the butterflies trail each of the players' last vector positions.

After some testing, it was determined that having a mechanic in which the butterflies stop trailing the players when the players stop moving needed to be implemented. This would prevent players from just standing in front of the room. They also slow down if players have not been guiding them to milkweed.

Through playtesting, we realized that players didn't understand that the start boxes were start boxes, so I placed the arrow indicators to clarify this to the players.

Motion Capture Headset

The footage shows the butterflies being controlled via keyboard input. However, in the actual game, the butterflies are controlled via motion capture (Qualysis).

As shown in the gameplay footage, players wore these mocap hats and would run around the LIM to guide the butterflies. All the decisions made regarding the butterfly trailing system were based around the fact that players would have constantly be moving around the room to guide the butterflies.

Cars

As mentioned, cars are the biggest killers of butterflies. As one of the main mechanics of the game, their implementation was key.

I used a spline system that the cars would trail throughout the game.

Whenever butterflies touch the cars' hitboxes, they die.

The number of cars on each road and their speeds were adjusted throughout the development of the game

Milkweed

I implemented milkweed models during asset placement phase. I placed trigger volumes on each model in order to make them compatible with the behavior scripts. When a butterfly enters the trigger volume their trailing speed increases.

This made sense narratively since butterflies' main source of food is milkweed and it incentivized players to guide butterflies to milkweed

Pollution

I worked with the lead programmer to implement the smoke particles created by Julio Martinez (VFX Artist). When a butterfly enters the trigger volume, their trailing speed drops.

Juice

Creating and implementing feedback VFX/SFX to clarify or indicate an interaction

Milkweed Particles

Death Particle

During playtesting, the team noticed that it was difficult for players to tell when their butterflies had died.

To clarify their deaths, I created a "death poof" particle that would play on their death.

I created the particle system and sprites, and implemented them into the butterfly script.

Julio Martinez created a set of particle effects for the milkweed interaction. Using one of his particle effects, I implemented it into a script created by Tim Lin for the milkweed particle effect and sparkle sound effect to play when a butterfly enters the milkweed's trigger volume.

This was added after I reviewed playtest feedback and saw that many players didn't know if their butterflies had gotten to the milkweed.

Asset Implementation

I replaced the whiteboxes with in-house and outsourced assets. This includes models, textures, and animations.

I worked with Kelly Zhang (Tech Artist) to replace all white boxes with game-ready assets.

I replaced placeholder assets with game-ready butterfly assets. Implemented flapping animations and worked with the lead programmer to set an animation offset to make sure the butterflies didn't sync up.