Jump Detection to Animated Beats - Proof of Concept Only (Studio 2 - Week 4)

As a proof of concept, I decided to animate the musical beats using After Effects so I can quickly place the animation into Unity and start playtesting and see what the jumping interaction is like. One of my concerns is that, in my head and theoretically speaking, the jumping mechanism would be a lot of fun (especially in a group setting); however, I'd like to actually test this in practice. As I'm still learning Unity, it would take me a much longer time to implement the actual musical beat system (whether it's using Koreographer or the Animator pane), so I decided to make a mock-up animation instead as a proof of concept only.

At first, I created the animation with the beats coming forward at an angle like in 3D space. I quickly realised how wrong this was after Sahaj helped me put the video onto a plane in Unity. As the plane is angled close to the floor, the beats actually don't need to be angled like in 3D space, but should be flat instead. The 3D perspective is shown via Unity, not in the animation. This resulted in a hilarious playtest with Sahaj (Studio 3) and Music (Studio 1) where the beats were appearing so quickly we didn't have any time to react to the jumps. Through this playtest, I also realised I needed to space out the beats more (they're way too frequent and quick), and share the beats with another player.

In the second round of playtesting, I fixed the animation so that it was more portrait than landscape in orientation. This allowed the animation to display the beats longer leading up to the jump, and split the beats between two players. I also tweaked the animation so they're not at an angle, and come down from the top of the animation to the bottom like normal. After playtesting by myself (I didn't have another person to play with at home late at night), I realised the beats are still a bit too quick. I tried slowing down the animation to 90%, but then found the beats too slow to jump too (they appear in that awkward moment in-between two jumps in terms of "feel" and "rhythm"). I then tweaked the animation to play at 95%, and this feels much better.

Note: There is a slight lag to the screen recordings, so it looks like I'm jumping after the line comes forward. This doesn't occur during the playtesting.

Test Animation Music Credits: Rhythm Emotion from Gundam Wing

Reflection: Surprisingly, I found this exercise to be a good way to rapidly prototype the speed and frequency of the beats coming forward. There probably would've been a better way to do this in Unity (which I plan to use to generate the beats moving forward), but at this early stage of the project, I just needed something to work so I could quickly playtest. I will still need to finetune the speed of the beats, as sometimes it's too fast and too slow. Interestingly, as I was jumping, I also found myself swinging my arms like I was holding a rope, and that helped my jumping rhythm too.

Sahaj also suggested making the beats 3D, so they're slightly raised above the ground. In further iterations, I'll also need to figure out how to face the avatars the other way, so they're facing the rope (beats) coming forward. Another thing to note is whether the avatars get in the way of the rope's visibility - I'll need to have think about this a bit more, and see if there is a solution around this.