Candy Finder: Casual Gaming in VR
As a final project for the New Frontiers – AR/VR in Practice course, my teammates and I designed and developed a demo of the game Candy Finder, a VR single-player casual game for stress-relieving and mood improvement. The initial challenge was to ideate a short demo of a VR application for the Google Cardboard VR headset and develop it using Unity in a 7-week period.
Academic project completed for the New Frontiers – AR/VR in Practice course. Master of Digital Media, Toronto Metropolitan University.
ROLE
Research, user experience and interaction design
TEAM MEMBERS
Maria Camila Bohorquez and Aline Nguyen
TOOLS
Unity
YEAR
2020
Overview
Now more than ever different generations are turning to technology as a source of relief from emotional distress and constructive entertainment. After doing some research, we learned casual video games help reduce anger, depression, and tension more effectively than other leisure activities when used moderately. Games offer a high level of cognitive absorption called flow, where players experience a deep focus on the challenge and no conscious awareness of competing thoughts or emotions.
We decided to create a casual game for VR that supported mental health and relaxation using this principle. The goal was to create a prototype of a VR experience that incorporated the feeling of delving into a virtual space with a positive, easy-going motif, and a single instruction on a repetitive task, hoping to help the user achieve a state of flow that would bring joy and tranquility.
Ideation and prototyping
Our first proposal consisted of a completely white world where the player throws paint at white mystery objects coming at him using a paintball gun. The paint reveals if they are “desired” or “undesired” objects. The user has to catch the desired objects and avoid the undesired ones.
Brainstorming session
First prototype: storyboards
Feedback from our peers included simplifying the experience, and focusing on generating a flow feeling through low-effort tasks (finding objects at gaze) that generate high rewards (achieved with pleasant sounds, particle effects and points).
We developed a second prototype in Unity using simple shapes, where all objects are initially white and reveal their color only when the player gazes at them. The user must find a collect the golden shapes
Second Prototype in Unity
User testing concluded the white objects were too hard to find in the environment, but the overall experience was satisfactory.
With this in mind, we developed a final prototype in Unity incorporating colors. The game is set in a fictional world made of candy where the goal is to find and catch the golden candies among the many candy shapes present in the environment. When gazed at, candies can be either golden candies or regular candies.
In Challenge Mode, the player must find and collect eight golden candies in thirty seconds. In Zen mode, the player can catch as many candies as he wants without a time limit.
