Milestone 2

During the second week of development, our team focused on developing a welcome hub and a space scene map, where users can go to space and learn about different planets in our solar system. We also further developed the storyline of the game, where users help villagers bring their home back to life by learning and unlocking new words and objects. From our playtesting feedback, we also found that it would be beneficial to create tutorials during gameplay to make it more intuitive.

We developed the main scene as a cartoon-like village with trees, houses, and rivers. When the user is spawned in, our mascot Quacky leads the user through a tutorial where they learn the word “apple,” and the singular apple turns into a basket of apples, which provides food for the villagers. This main scene also includes a portal where users can choose which map to teleport to.

When the user teleports to the space map, the planets are initially dead and not in their correct orbits. The user can click on each of the planets, which displays a fun fact. Then, they can guess the name of the planet — if correct, the player can grab the planet and place it into its correct orbit position, otherwise the user gets more hints for the word. Once all planets have been named, the solar system comes to life. The user can then teleport back to the main village, where the sky is now alive with the sun, moon, and stars.

We found that young children are unable to use VR headsets, so we pivoted our target user to people who are learning English as a second language, such as high school students in ESOL programs. Thus, we are still able to market and sell our app to schools, who are more likely to have the funding to afford VR.

In the next week, we plan to develop more maps such as food and animals, as well as audio narration, which will make our game more immersive. We also plan to add side quests with villagers and add more NPCs that interact with the player.