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How cheese is made

The game is a digitalization of the food process that milk must go through until it reaches the cheese state. It was made for a client, Digital Chef that creates interactive and enriched 3D food content and AR/VR applications for sales, marketing and e-commerce. They have a learning program which revolves around the agro & food industry which educates (v)MBO-students about the process of making food. This games goal is to explore how to use VR games for education and teach the steps required to turn milk into cheese.

In the game the player will need to operate the machines and make use of the other tools that are in the game to make cheese which includes operating the cheese press or the Pasteurizer. A floating robot acts as a tutorial.

Genre: Educational VR game

Year: 2021

Players: 1

Team size: 4

My part: Game Design, Programming

Goal: Educate the player about the process of turning milk into cheese.

Design process

The most important part of development was client communication. So a lot of time went into analysing the clients wishes and giving status updates and implementing their feedback. For that matter we created a lot of concept graphics and explanatory videos, e.g. a game demo in Minecraft to show how the final product would be played.

Making a game in VR was a first time for everyone in the team and it took a long time to set it up and get the controls right. Before starting with the actual design, I spend some time analysing existing games and how they deal with motion sickness and movement. The findings were then incorporated in the first prototype and used for later projects as well.

VR proved to make more problems later during development, as we only had one VR headset and were forced to work from home. This meant only one of us could have the headset for testing and bug fixing while the rest had to work on a different branch in which we implemented a workaround that uses keyboard and mouse input. Furthermore, the project was split into two main stations:

1. Pasteurizing

2. Pressing

 

I took care of station 2 while the other programmer coded the interactions of station 1 in the game. This helped us work on two parts of the game simultaneously and implement them seamlessly as the assets and scripts did not overlap. Unfortunately, the third part of cheese production, brining, had to be cancelled as we ran out of time.

One of the clients request was a clean environment which is why we chose a futuristic setting and used a lot of bright colors.

To gamify the learning process further we implemented a robot that would, given some more time, react to your actions and give funny comments. By now it only uses text to explain what the player needs to do.

During playtesting we noticed that the nature of VR allowed for a lot more interactions with the game world than initially planned, so we emphasized the idea of having a playground instead of a strict path to follow.

In the end both stations were put together and the controls were optimised for VR. We took some time for bug fixing and controls but underestimated the afford.

 

What went well

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client communication
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realistic display of cheese production
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playground to experiment in
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useful implementation of VR

What could be done better

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time management, project did not include all processes
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bug-fixing
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bringing more fun into the education

What I learned

“The time it takes to develop and optimize a game should not be underestimated.”

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