Project Description

"Get in the Coop!" is an AR experience game where the core mechanic is chasing chickens. The premise is that the player is a farmer doing their daily activities of herding back chickens into their coop. Cindy acted as our main programmer, working on the core mechanic and coding a farm for the penn to exist in, laying out buttons for the canvas, and other features like the detection of the plane to the feature of moving the entire chicken farm to how the player wished. David worked on modeling throughout the project and I worked on the first prototype of the core mechanic in the beginning, concepting the chickens for David to model after, and worked on drawing and coding UI elements for the menu and the game.

What went right

The concept was very simple, so were able to get right into it with a prototype of how the mechanic might work, then the first prototype of the game where we tested values (at this time we were still using the cube chickens). Although it was David's first time solo modeling and doing animations in blender, the chicken, the farm fence and the chicken coop turned out great! Cindy's work as a programmer was very admirable as she thought of ideas that would make our game more refined and made then set out to make it happen. I'm pretty proud of the UI buttons I made for the game, since it fits well with the whole farm aesthetic, and also the company logo and menu scene.

What went wrong

It took awhile for us to settle on the game concept and because of that we thought of many features for the "Kabedon-Bird Dating Game" and about two weeks in we realized we should just go back to the original idea of just chasing chickens. By the end of the project we were less communicative with each other than the beginning of the project since we were more focused working on our individual tasks and juggling work outside of this class (the cursed finals week), but we were able to pull through the last week and this week (good job team!). Because David was working with a new program and was modeling on his own, it took him about 3 to 4 weeks to finish. We also had a technological issue with my phone not being able to open an APK file (the Unity build for Android phones) and that meant less availability for build testing. I had gathered potential audio for the game and wished I could have coded a random sense of chicken sounds rather than the one chicken sound that gets activated right now in the game.

What I’ve learned

I've learned to stay on task and communicate with my team, as we all definitely should especially to tell each what have finished or completed or if a person needs help with anything, perhaps the other teammates may be able to help. Also, for almost every project, we (as in the group for that particular project) always end up starting big, even though this time we had a very strong and simple core concept. Our group managed to pull through and realize that we should just focus on the original mechanic and discard the features we thought of. This is our fault in thinking ahead of ourselves when we didn't even have a working prototype of the mechanic yet. However a dating sim game with birds does sound like an idea for the future.

Future Goals

Our plans for future development include: Level Design, a ramping of difficulty rather than a single scene with six chickens; Variety of chickens, since there are different breeds of chickens in the real world - why not make use of that and design different types of chickens that might react differently in being herded? (also possibility of including the original rubber chicken that inspired the game as an easter egg); A ranking/leaderboard system, in which players can keep track of other people's (or their own) time completion records; More visual clarity in what the player should be doing and a refinment in the stablization of the game's plane detection and farm placement. However, the game is playable right now so go check it out!